The economic form that prevails or dominates in a social group, the way in which the members of this group gain their subsistence, is a fact whose main features can be directly observed with sufficient assurance everywhere. We may remain much in doubt as to the religious and social notions of the Australians, but not the slightest doubt is possible as to the character of their production: the Australians are hunters and gatherers of plants. It is perhaps impossible to penetrate the mental cultural of the ancient Peruvians, but the fact that the citizens of the Inca empire were an agricultural people is open for anyone to see.^XXXIII

By “production” and its “character,” therefore, Grosse simply means the particular main source of a people’s sustenance. Hunting, fishing, pastoralism, agriculture—these are the “relations of production” that have a determining effect on all other cultural relations of a people. The first thing to note here is that, if no more than this meager discovery is involved, Herr Grosse’s exaggeration about “most cultures” is certainly quite unfounded. The knowledge that the particular main source that a given people draw on for their sustenance is extraordinarily important for their cultural development, is in no way Herr Grosse’s spanking new discovery, but rather an age-old and honorable element in all doctrines of cultural history. This knowledge led in particular to the conventional division of peoples into hunters, pastoralists and agriculturalists, which is found in all cultural histories and which Herr Grosse finally adopts himself after a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing. But this knowledge is not only quite old, it is also quite false—at least in the bland version of it that Grosse offers. If all we know is that a people lives from hunting, pastoralism or agriculture, we do not yet know anything about its relations of production or the rest of its culture. The Hottentots in Southwest Africa today, whose herds, which formed their previous source of livelihood, have been taken away by the Germans and who have been supplied with modern shotguns, have been forcibly made into hunters.¹⁰⁰ The relations of production of this “hunting people,” however, have nothing at all in common with those of the Indian hunters of California, who still live in their primitive seclusion from the world, and are themselves very different from the hunting companies of Canada, which supply American and European capitalists with tradable animal pelts for the fur trade. The pastoralists of Peru, who before the Spanish invasion kept their llamas communistically in the cordilleras under Inca rule, the Arab nomads with their patriarchal herds in Africa or the Arabian peninsula, the present-day peasants in the Swiss, Bavarian and Tyrolean alps, who pursue their long-established “Alpenbücher” in the midst of the capitalist world, the half-wild Roman slaves who kept the enormous herds of their masters in the wastes of Apulia, the farmers in today’s Argentina who fatten up immense herds for the Ohio slaughterhouses and processed-meat factories—these are all examples of “pastoralism,” each presenting a totally different type of production and culture. As for “agriculture,” this embraces such a broad scale of the most varying kinds of economy and levels of culture—from the ancient Indian clan community to the modern latifundium, from the tiny peasant holding to the knightly estates east of the Elbe, from the English tenant system to Romanian “jobbaggio,”¹⁰¹ from Chinese peasant horticulture to Brazilian slave plantations, from the women’s hoe-tillage of Haiti to the giant North American farms with steam and electric machinery—so that Herr Grosse’s showy revelations about the significance of production only display a glaring lack of understanding of what “production” really means. It was precisely against this kind of crude and coarse “materialism,” which takes into consideration only the external natural conditions of production and culture, and which found its best and most exhaustive expression in the English sociologist [Henry Thomas] Buckle, that Marx and Engels directed themselves. What is decisive for the economic and cultural conditions of people is not the external natural source of their sustenance, but rather the connections that people form between one another in their labor. The social connections of production determine the question: what form of production prevails among a given people? Only when this aspect of production has been thoroughly grasped is it possible to understand the determining influences of a people’s production on its family relations, its concepts of right, its religious ideas and the development of its arts. Most European observers, however, find it extraordinarily difficult to penetrate the social relations of production of so-called primitive peoples. In contrast to Herr Grosse, who believes he already knows a world when he knows nothing more than that the Peruvian Incas were an agricultural people, Sir Henry Maine says: “The characteristic error of the direct observer of unfamiliar social or juridical phenomena is to compare them too hastily with familiar phenomena apparently of the same kind.”^XXXIV

The connection between forms of family and “forms of production” understood in this way is expressed in the following terms by Herr Grosse:

At the lowest stage, people feed themselves by means of hunting—in the broadest sense of the term—and by the gathering of plants. This most primitive form of production is also associated with the most primitive form of division of labor—the physiologically based division between the two sexes. While the provision of animal food falls to the man, the foraging of roots and fruits is the task of the woman. Under these conditions, the economic center of gravity lies almost always on the male side, and as a consequence the primitive form of family everywhere bears an unmistakably patriarchal character. Whatever the ideas about blood relationships may be, primitive man stands in fact as lord and master among his wives and children, even if he does not recognize his progeny as blood relations. From this lowest stage, production can continue in two directions, according to whether the female or the male branch of the economy undergoes a further development. But which of these two branches becomes the stem depends above all on the natural conditions in which the primitive group lives. If the flora and climate of the land immediately suggest and reward the conservation and subsequent care of food plants, then the female branch of plant gathering gradually develops into plant cultivation. In fact, with primitive agricultural peoples this occupation is always found in women’s hands. The economic center of gravity accordingly shifts to the female side, and as a result we find among all primitive societies that support themselves predominantly by agriculture a matriarchal family form or at least the traces of this. The woman stands now at the center of the family as the main provider and landowner. The construction of a matriarchy in the strict sense, however, the actual rule of women, occurs only in very infrequent cases—in particular where the social group is not exposed to attacks by external enemies. In all other cases, the man regains as protector the supremacy he lost as provider. In this way, the family forms develop that prevail among most agricultural peoples, presenting a compromise between the matriarchal and the patriarchal direction. A large part of humanity, however, has undergone a completely different development. Those hunting peoples living in regions that place difficulties in the way of agriculture, while they offer animals that are suitable and profitable for domestication, have advanced not like the former to plant cultivation, but instead to that of animals. Livestock breeding, however, which gradually developed out of hunting, appears exactly like its predecessor as a privilege of the man.¹⁰² In this way, the economic superiority of the male side that is already present is strengthened, and this relationship finds consistent expression in the fact that all peoples who feed themselves principally from livestock stand under the rule of the patriarchal family form. Besides, the commanding position of the man in stock-raising societies is further increased by another circumstance that is similarly connected directly with the form of their production. Stock-raising peoples are always inclined to warlike entanglements and consequently to the development of a centralized organization for warfare. The unavoidable result is an extreme form of patriarchy in which woman becomes a slave without rights under a husband endowed with despotic power.

But those peaceful agricultural peoples among whom women rules as the breadwinner in the family, or at least enjoys to some extent a freer position, are generally subjugated by the warlike stock-raisers and take over from them, along with other customs, the despotic rule of the man in the family. “And so we find all civilized nations today under the sign of a more or less sharply marked patriarchal family form.”^XXXV

The remarkable historical destinies of the human family depicted here, in their dependence on forms of production, thus follow the schema: hunting period—individual family with male supremacy; stock-raising period = individual family with still worse male supremacy; period of lower agriculture = individual family with sporadic female supremacy, but later subjection of agriculturalists by stock-raisers, i.e. here individual family with male supremacy; and as the apex of the edifice, period of higher agriculture = individual family with male supremacy. Herr Grosse, we can see, is very serious in his rejection of modern developmental theory. For him there is no development of family forms at all. History begins and ends with the individual family and male supremacy. What Grosse does not notice is that after he has showily promised to explain the origin of family forms from forms of production, he actually presupposes the family form as something always already given, i.e. as the individual family, as a modern household, and assumes this unchanged under all forms of production. What he actually pursues as different “family forms” with the change of epochs is simply the question of the relationship of one sex to the other. Male supremacy or female supremacy—this is the “family form” according to Grosse, which in a completely harmonious manner he reduces as crudely to an external characteristic as he simplifies the “form of production” to the question of hunting, stock-raising or agriculture. That “male supremacy” or “female supremacy” can embrace dozens of different family forms, that there can be different kinship systems within the same cultural stage of “hunters”—none of this exists for Herr Grosse, as little as does the question of the social relations within a form of production. The reciprocal relationship of family forms and production forms here comes down to the following ingenious “materialism”: the two sexes are seen from the start as business competitors. Whoever feeds the family also rules in the family, so the philistine believes, and so also does the civil code. The bad luck of the female sex, however, is that only exceptionally in history—at the low stage of tillage agriculture—were they the leading provider of food, and even then they generally had to give way to the warlike male sex. And so the history of the family form is basically no more than a history of women’s slavery, in all “forms of production” and despite all forms of production. The only connection between family forms and economic forms is thus in the end simply the slight difference between somewhat milder and somewhat severer forms of male supremacy. In conclusion, the first message of redemption for enslaved woman in the history of human culture appears as the Christian church, which at least knows no distinction between the two sexes in the blue ether of heaven, even if it still does so on earth. “By this doctrine, Christianity endowed women with an elevated position before which the arbitrary will of the male must bow,”^XXXVI Herr Grosse concludes, finally, after wandering far and wide on the waters of economic history, dropping anchor in the harbor of the Christian church. How “surprisingly understandable,” then, those forms of family appear that have inspired sociologists to “strange hypotheses,” when they are viewed “in connection with the forms of production”!

The most striking thing, however, about this history of the “family form” is the treatment of the clan association or kin group, as Grosse calls it. We have seen the tremendous role that clan associations played in social life at earlier levels of culture. We have seen—particularly in the wake of Morgan’s epoch-making investigations—that they were the actual social form of people before the development of the territorial state, and continued for a long while after to be both the economic unit and the religious community. How do these facts stand in the light of the remarkable history of Grosse’s “family forms”? Grosse evidently cannot simply deny the existence of a kinship constitution among all primitive peoples. But since this contradicts his scheme of individual families and the dominance of private property, he seeks to reduce their significance as close to zero as he can, except for the period of lower agriculture: “The power of kinship arose with lower agriculture, and it decays with it as well. Among all higher agricultural peoples, the kinship order has already either disappeared or in the process of doing so.”^XXXVII Grosse thus lets the “kinship power” and its communist economy burst into the midst of economic and family history like a pistol shot, simply to have it fall back and dissolve right away. How the origin and existence of the kinship order and its functions are to be explained in the millennia of cultural development before lower agriculture, since for Grosse they had at this time neither an economic function nor a social significance vis-à-vis the individual family, and what these kinships were that led their shadowy existence among hunters and stock-raisers against the background of separate families with private housekeeping, remains a private secret for Herr Grosse. Just as little is he concerned that his story stands in blatant contradiction with certain generally recognized facts. Kin groups are seen as acquiring importance only with lower agriculture; they are then generally linked with the institution of blood revenge, with religious observance and very frequently with animal names. All these things however are far older than agriculture, and must therefore according to Grosse’s own theory derive from relations of production of far more primitive cultural periods. Grosse explains the kinship order of higher agriculturalists, such as the ancient Germans, Celts and Indians, as a legacy from the period of lower agriculture, when they had their roots in the female rural economy. But the higher agriculture of cultured peoples did not arise from female tilling, but rather from stock raising, which was already pursued by men, and where consequently, according to Grosse, the kin groups were without significance in relation to the patriarchal family economy. According to Grosse, the kinship order is meaningless with these nomadic pastoralists, and only comes to prevail for a while with settlement and agriculture. According to the most respected scholars, however, the agrarian constitution followed a quite opposite direction: as long as pastoralists followed a nomadic way of life, kinship associations were the most powerful in every respect, whereas with settlement and agriculture the kinship constitution begins to loosen and decline in relation to the local association of agriculturalists, whose community of interest is stronger than the traditional blood ties, and the kinship community is transformed into the so-called neighborhood community. This was the view of Ludwig von Maurer, Kovalevsky, Henry Maine and [Emile] Laveleye,¹⁰³ and the same phenomenon has more recently been noted by [Konstantin] Kaufman among the Kyrgyz and Yakuts of Central Asia.

We should finally mention that Grosse is understandably unable, from his point of view, to offer the slightest explanation of the most important phenomena in the field of primitive family relations, such as matriarchy (mother-right), and confines himself to shrugging his shoulders and declaring matriarchy “the rarest curiosity in sociology”; that he makes the incredible assertion that among the Australians ideas of blood relationship had no influence on their family systems, and the still more incredible assertion that among the ancient Peruvians there was no trace of kinship groups; that he bases his ideas about the agrarian constitution of the Germanic people on Laveleye’s obsolete and unreliable material; and that finally he echoes the same Laveleye’s fabulous assertion that “still today” the Russian village community that prevails among a population of 35 million forms a kinship community with blood relationship, a “family community,” which is about as true as it would be to claim that all the inhabitants of Berlin formed “still today” a great family community. All this specially enables Grosse to treat the “church father of German Social Democracy,” Morgan, as a dead dog.

The above examination of Grosse’s treatment of family forms and kinship gives an idea of how he treats the “forms of economy.” The entire proof that he directs against the assumption of primitive communism rests on “yes, but,” with unchallengeable facts being admitted, but others contrasted to them in such a way that what is unwanted is diminished, what is wanted is exaggerated, and the result correspondingly dressed up to look good.

Grosse himself reports of the lower hunters:

Individual possession, which among all lower societies consists principally if not exclusively in movable goods, is here almost completely insignificant; the most valuable piece of property, however, the hunting ground, belongs to all the men of a tribe in common. It follows that the proceeds of hunting have to be divided from time to time among all members of a horde. This is reported for example among the Botocudos¹⁰⁴ (Ehrenreich, “Über die Botocudos,” in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, XIX, 31¹⁰⁵). In some parts of Australia, similar customs exist. Thus all members of a primitive group are and remain more or less equally poor. Since there are no essential differences of wealth, a main source for the origin of tribal differences is lacking. In general, all adult men have equal rights within the tribe.^XXXVIII

In the same way, “membership of a kin group has in some (!) connections a fundamental influence on the life of the lower hunter. It ascribes him the right to use a particular hunting ground, and it gives him the right and duty of protection and revenge” (this page). Similarly, Grosse concedes the possibility of a kinship communism among the lower hunters of central California.

But for all that, the kinship group here is loose and weak, there is no economic community. “The mode of production of the Arctic hunters however is so completely individualist that the kinship connection is scarcely able to resist centrifugal tendencies.”^XXXIX Likewise, among the Australians, the use of the common hunting land “in hunting and gathering is generally pursued not at all in common, but each individual family conducts a separate economy.” And in general, “the lack of food does not permit lasting unification of large groups, but forces them to disperse” (this page).

Let us turn then to the higher hunters.

It is true that “land among the higher hunters is indeed as a rule the common property of the tribe or kinship group” (this page), true that we directly find at this stage large buildings as common quarters for such groups (this page), while we also learn: “The extensive dams and defenses that [Alexander] Mackenzie saw in the rivers of the Haidah¹⁰⁶ and that in his estimation must have required the work of the whole tribe, were supervised by the local chief, without whose permission no one was allowed to fish. They were thus very likely seen as the property of the whole village community, to which the fishing waters and hunting grounds undividedly belonged” (this page).

But “movable property here has acquired such an extension and importance that despite the equal possession of land a great inequality of wealth can develop” (this page), and “as a rule, food, so far as we can see, is no more seen as common property than are other movable goods. Thus the domestic kinship groups can only to a very limited sense be described as economic communities” (this page).

We move then to the next higher cultural stage, that of nomadic stock-raising (pastoralism). Here again Grosse tells us:

It is true that “even the most restless nomads do not roam in unbounded spaces, they all rather move within a quite firmly limited region, which is seen as the property of their tribe and which is frequently divided again among the individual separate families and kin groups” (this page). Furthermore: “The land in almost the whole region of stock-raising is the common property of the tribe or kin group” (this page). “The land is naturally the common property of all kin group members and as such is divided by the kin group or its chief between the different families for their use” (this page).

But “the land is not the most valuable possession of the nomad. His greatest wealth is his herd, and livestock is always (!) the separate property of the individual families. The stock-raising kin group has never (!) developed into a community of economy and possession.”

Finally we have the lower agriculturalists. Here, it is true for the first time that the kinship group is admitted to be a completely communist economic community.

But—and here this “but” follows hard on the heels—here too “industry undermines social equality” (when Grosse talks of industry he naturally means commodity production, being unable to differentiate the one from the other), “creating a movable individual property, which prevails over the common property in land and destroys this.’ ” And despite the community of land, “the separation between rich and poor already exists here.”^XL Communism is thus reduced to a brief interval of economic history, which moreover begins with private property and ends with private property. Quod erat demonstrandum.¹⁰⁷

3

In order to assess the value of Grosse’s schema, we shall turn directly to the facts. Let us examine the economic form of the most backward peoples—if only with a fleeting glance. Who are these?

Grosse calls them the “lower hunters,” and says of them:

The lower hunting peoples today form only a small fragment of humanity. Their imperfect and unfruitful form of production condemns them to numerical weakness and cultural poverty, and they are everywhere on the retreat in the face of larger and stronger peoples, now continuing their existence in inaccessible primal forests and inhospitable deserts. A large part of these wretched tribes belong to pygmy races.¹⁰⁸ It is precisely the weakest peoples who are forced by the stronger in the struggle for existence into the regions most hostile to culture, and thereby condemned also to cultural stagnation. Yet representatives of the oldest economic form are still found today on all continents with the exception of Europe. Africa houses many such hunting peoples who have grown small; unfortunately, however, we so far have information only on one of these, the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert¹⁰⁹ [in German South-West Africa—R.L.]; the lives of the other pygmy tribes are still hidden in the darkness of the central African forests. If we turn from Africa to the East, we find first of all in central Ceylon [off the southern tip of the Indian peninsula—R.L.] the dwarf hunting people of the Vedda,¹¹⁰ then on the Andaman islands the Mincopie,¹¹¹ in inland Sumatra the Kubu¹¹² and in the mountain wildernesses of the Philippines the Aeta¹¹³—three tribes who again belong to the small races. The whole of the Australian continent was peopled with lower hunting peoples before the European settlement; and if in the last half of this century the indigenous peoples have been driven out of the greater part of the coastal regions by the colonists, they still persist in the deserts of the hinterland. In America, finally, from the extreme south to the far north, we find a whole series of groups of an extreme cultural poverty. In the rain- and storm-lashed mountain wastes around Cape Horn [the southern tip of South America—R.L.] dwell the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, whom more than one observer has declared to be the poorest and crudest of all humans. Besides the Botocudos with their evil reputation, many other hunting tribes still wander through the forests of Brazil, including the Bororó who are somewhat familiar to us thanks to the studies of [Karl] von den Steinen.¹¹⁴ Central California [on the west coast of North America—R.L.] has a number of tribes at a level only little above the most wretched peoples of Australia.^XLI115

Without continuing any further with Grosse, who strangely also counts the Eskimos¹¹⁶ among the lowest peoples, we shall now dwell on some of the tribes mentioned above in search of traces of a socially planned organization of labor.

Let us turn first of all to the Australian cannibals,¹¹⁷ who according to several scholars exist at the lowest level of culture that the human race displays on this earth. Among these aborigines we particularly find the already mentioned primitive division of labor between men and women; the latter principally see to vegetable food as well as wood and water, while the men are responsible for hunting and providing animal food.

We also find here a picture of social labor that is the direct opposite of the “individual search for food” and offers an example right away of how the most primitive societies see to it that all labor-power needed is diligently applied, for example:

All the males in the Chepara tribe¹¹⁸ are expected to provide food, if not sick. If a man is lazy and stays in the camp, he is jeered at and insulted by the others. Men, women, and children leave the camp early in the morning for the purpose of hunting for food where they think that game will be plentiful. The men and women carry the various catches to the nearest water hole, where fires are made and game is cooked. The men, women, and children all eat together amicably, the food being distributed among them by the old men equally to all the men, women, and children. After the meal, the women carry what is left of the cooked food to the camp, men hunting by the way.^XLII

Now some further information on how production is planned among the Australian aborigines. This is in fact extremely complicated, and worked out in the utmost detail. Each Australian tribe is divided into a number of groups, each one being named after an animal or a plant that it honors, and possessing a demarcated part of the tribe’s total territory. One particular territory thus belongs for example to the kangaroo-men, another to the emu-men (the emu is a large bird similar to an ostrich), a third to the snake-men (the Australians even eat snakes), etc. According to the findings of the most recent scientific research, these “totems,” as we have already mentioned in another connection, are almost always animals and plants that the aborigines make use of as food. Each of these groups has its chief, who takes the lead in the hunt. The animal or plant name and the cult corresponding to it are not an empty form: each particular group of aborigines is in fact obliged to provide the animal or plant food of its name, and to take responsibility for the supply and continuation of this source of food. And each of these groups does this not for itself, but above all for the other groups in the tribe. The kangaroo-men, for example, are obliged to provide kangaroo meat for the rest of the tribe, the snake-men to provide snakes, the caterpillar-men a certain caterpillar that is seen as a delicacy, and so on. All this is bound up with strict religious observances and great ceremonies. It is almost a universal rule, for example, that the people of a particular group may not eat their own animal or plant totem, or only in great moderation, although they must provide this for others. A man in the snake-group, for example, if he kills a snake—even in times of great hunger—must refrain from eating it himself, but rather bring it back to the camp for the others. In the same way, an emu-man will only consume emu meat with extreme moderation, and never take the eggs and fat of the bird—which are used as a remedy—for himself, but hand them over to his fellow tribes people. On the other hand, other groups may not hunt or gather and consume the animal or plant without the permission of the corresponding totem men. Each year, a festive ceremony is held by each group, with the object of securing the multiplication of the totemic animal or plant (by way of singing, wind instruments and various religious ceremonies), with only the other groups being allowed to eat it. The time for such ceremonies to take place is decided for each group by its chief, who is also in charge of the ceremony. And this time is directly bound up with the conditions of production. In central Australia, animals and plants suffer from a long dry season, while the short wet season leads to an increase in animal life and a vigorous plant growth. Most of the ceremonies of the totem groups are then held as the good season approaches. According to [Friedrich] Ratzel, it is a “comic misunderstanding” to say that the aborigines call themselves after their most important foodstuffs.^XLIII In the system of totem groups briefly indicated above, however, anyone can already recognize at first glance an elaborate organization of social production. The individual totem groups are evidently just limbs in an extensive system of division of labor. All the groups together form an ordered and planned whole, and each group also conducts itself in a quite ordered and planned way under a unitary leadership. And the fact that this system of production assumes a religious form, the form of various food taboos, ceremonies, etc., merely shows that this production form is of age-old date, that this organization has existed among the aborigines for many centuries or even millennia, so that it has had time to ossify into rigid formulas, and what originally were mere expediencies for the purpose of producing and providing food have become articles of a belief in secret connections. These connections, discovered by the Englishmen [Walter Baldwin] Spencer and [Francis James] Gillen, are also confirmed by another scholar, [James George] Frazer, who expressly says, for example:

We have to bear in mind that the various totemic groups in totemic society do not live in isolation from one another; they intermingle and practice their magic powers for the common good. In the original system, if we are not mistaken, the kangaroo-men hunted and killed kangaroo for the benefit of all other totemic groups as well as their own, and it would have been the same with the caterpillar totem, the hawk totem and the rest. Under the new system [i.e. in the religious form—R.L.], in which a totemic group was forbidden to kill and eat its own totem, the kangaroo-men continued to provide kangaroos, but no longer for their own consumption; the emu-men continued to see to the multiplication of emus, although they were no longer allowed to enjoy emu meat; the caterpillar-men continued their magic arts for the procreation of caterpillars, even if these delicacies were now destined for other stomachs.¹¹⁹

In sum, what appears to us today as a religious system was in age-old times a simple system of organized social production with a far-reaching division of labor.

If we now turn to the distribution of products among the Australian aborigines, we find an even more detailed and complex system. Each part of a wild animal killed, each bird egg found and each handful of fruit gathered, is carefully allocated according to quite firm rules to particular members of the society for their consumption. For example, what the women gather in the way of plant food belongs to them and their children. The proceeds of the men’s hunting is divided according to rules that differ from tribe to tribe, but which in all tribes are extremely detailed. The English scholar [Alfred William] Howitt, for example, who studied the populations in southeastern Australia, chiefly in the state of Victoria, found the following kind of distribution:

It is assumed that a man kills a kangaroo at a distance from the camp. Two other men are with him but are too late to assist in killing it. The distance from the camp being considerable, the kangaroo is cooked before being carried home. While the first man lights a fire, the others cut up the game. The three cook the entrails and eat them. The following distribution is made. Men 2 and 3 receive one leg and the tail, and one leg and part of the haunch, because they were present, and had helped to cut the game up. Man number 1 received the remainder that he carried to the camp. The head and back are taken by his wife to her parents, the remainder goes to his parents. If he is short of meat, he keeps a little, but if, for instance, he has an opossum, he gives it all away. His mother, if she has caught some fish, may give him some, or his wife’s parents may give him some of their share; and they also would in such a case give her some next morning. Children in all cases well cared for by their grandparents.^XLIV

The following rules prevail in one tribe. With a kangaroo, for example, the hunter takes a piece near the loin, the father receives the backbone, ribs, shoulder and head; the mother the right leg and the younger brother the left foreleg. The father gives the tail and another piece of the back to his parents, the mother gives a part of the thigh and the shin to her parents. With a koala, the hunter keeps the left ribs for himself, the father receives the right hind-leg and mother the left, the elder brother receives the right foreleg and the younger brother the left. The elder sister receives a piece along the backbone, the younger one the liver. The right rib portion belongs to the father’s brother, a side piece to the maternal uncle, and the head goes to the young men’s camp.

In another tribe, however, the food obtained is always divided equally among those present. If a wallaby (a smaller species of kangaroo) is killed, and there are ten or twelve people, each of them receives a part of the animal. None of them touches the animal or any part of it until they have been given their portion by the hunter. If the person who killed the animal happens not to be present while it is being cooked, no one touches it until he returns. The women receive equal portions to the men, and children are carefully seen to by both parents.^XLV

These various modes of distribution, which differ from one tribe to another, also reveal their age-old character by the way that they appear in ritual forms and are summed up in sayings.^XLVI This expresses a tradition that may go back several millennia, and is seen by each generation as an unbreakable and strictly maintained rule that has been handed down. But two particular features of this system stand out very clearly. Above all, among the Australian aborigines—perhaps those humans who have remained most backward—it is not only production but also consumption that is planned and organized as a common social affair; and secondly, this plan evidently aims at the provisioning and security of all members of society, according both to their needs in terms of food and to their productive power. Under all conditions, special care is taken of old people, who in turn care look after the small children along with the mothers. The entire economic life of the Australian aborigines—production, division of labor, distribution of foodstuffs—has thus been planned and organized in the strictest way from earliest times by way of firm rules.

From Australia we turn to North America. Here in the West, the sparse remnants of Indians living on the Isla del Tiburón in the Gulf of California¹²⁰ and a narrow strip of the adjacent mainland present a particular interest, thanks to their complete isolation and their hostility to outsiders, which is how they have preserved their age-old customs in a very pure state. In 1895, United States scientists undertook an expedition to study this tribe, and the results of this were described by the American [William John] McGee.¹²¹ According to his report, the Seri Indian tribe—the name of this now very sparse people—is divided into four groups, each of these being named after an animal. The two largest are the pelican group and the turtle group. The customs, practices and rules of these groups in relation to their totemic animals are kept strictly secret, and were very hard to ascertain. But if we learn right away that the diet of these Indians consists principally of the meat of pelicans, turtles, fish and other sea creatures, and bear in mind the previously described system of totemic groups among the Australian aborigines, we may assume with a high degree of certainty that also among these Indians off the Californian coast the secret cult of totemic animals and the division of the tribe into corresponding groups expresses nothing other than the survivals of an age-old, strictly organized system of production with a division of labor, that has ossified into religious symbols. This view is reinforced, for example, by the fact that the supreme protective spirit of the Seri Indians is the pelican, but it is also this bird that forms the basis of that tribe’s economic existence. Pelican meat is the main food, pelican skins are used as clothing and bedding, as shields, and as the most important articles of exchange with outsiders. The Seri’s most important form of labor, hunting, is still practiced according to strict rules. Hunting pelicans, for example, is a well-organized common undertaking “with at least a semi-ceremonial character.” Pelican hunts may take place only at particular times, in such a way that the birds are protected during their breeding season, so as to secure their progeny. “The butchery [the massive slaughter of these top-heavy birds presents no difficulties—R.L.] is followed by a gluttonous feast, in which the half-famished families gorge the tenderer parts in the darkness, and noisily carouse in the carnage until overcome by slumber. Next day the matrons select the carcasses of least injured plumage and carefully remove the skins.”^XLVII The feast lasts for several days, with various ceremonies being associated with it. This “gluttonous feast,” therefore, and the noisy “gorging in darkness,” which Professor Bücher would certainly note as a sign of purely animal behavior, is actually very well organized—its ceremonial character is sufficient proof of this. The planned character of the hunt is combined with strict regulation of distribution and consumption. The common eating and drinking proceeds in a definite sequence: first comes the chief (who is also leader of the hunt), then the other warriors in order of age, then the oldest woman followed by her daughters in order of age, and finally the children also by order of age, with the girls, particularly those approaching marriageable age, enjoying certain preference by the connivance of the women:

[E]very member of the family or clan is entitled to necessary food and raiment, and it is the duty of every other person to see that the need is supplied. The stress of this duty is graded partly by proximity (so that, other things equal, it begins with the nearest person), but chiefly by standing and responsibility in the group (which again are reckoned as equivalents of age), whereby it becomes the business of the first at the feast to see that enough is left over to supply all below him; and this duty passes down the line in such wise as to protect the interests of the helpless infant …¹²²

From South America, we have the testimony of Professor [Karl] von den Steinen about the wild Indian tribe of the Bororó in Brazil. Here again we have above all the typical division of labor. The women obtain plant food, look for roots with a pointed stick, climb with great agility up palm trees, collecting nuts and cutting the palm kernels, seeking fruits and the like. The women also prepare plant food, and manufacture the cooking pots. When the women return home, they give the men fruit, etc. and receive whatever meat is left over. Distribution and consumption are strictly regulated. According to von den Steinen:

If Bororó etiquette in no way prevents them from sharing their meals, they have other strange customs for this, which clearly show that tribes where the proceeds of hunting are scarce have to search somehow for ways to forestall quarrels and disputes. One rule here is particularly striking: no one cooks the game that he has shot himself, but gives it to someone else to cook! The same prudent foresight is practiced for valuable hides and teeth. If a jaguar is killed, a great feast is held and the meat is eaten. But it is not the hunter who receives the hide and the teeth, but rather … the closest relative of the tribesman or woman who most recently died. The hunter is honored, and is presented by everyone with macaw feathers [the Bororós’ most prized ornament—R.L.] and bows decorated by oassú ribbons. The most important measure to preserve peace, however, is bound up with the office of medicine man,^XLVIII

or, as European like to say in such cases, the magician or priest. This person must be in attendance at the killing of any animal, but it is particularly important that every animal killed, as well as plant food, is only distributed and consumed by way of particular ceremonies. Hunting takes place on the initiative and under the leadership of the chief. The young and unmarried men live together in the “men’s house,” where they work together, produce weapons, tools and ornaments, spin, hold wrestling matches and also eat together, in strict discipline and order, as we have already mentioned above. “A family one of whose members dies,” says von den Steinen, “suffers a great loss

For everything that the dead person used is burned, thrown into the river or placed in the bone-basket, so that he will have no occasion to return. The hut is then completely evacuated. But the bereaved are given presents, bows and arrows are made for them, and there is also the custom that, if a jaguar is killed, the hide is given “to the brother of the last woman who died or to the uncle of the last man who died.”^XLVIX

A fully worked-out plan and social organization thus prevails in both production and distribution.

If we pass through the American mainland down to the most southerly point, we find here a primitive people at the lowest level of culture, the Fuegians, who inhabit the inhospitable archipelago at the tip of South America, the first information on them being brought back to Europe in the seventeenth century. In 1698, the French government sent an expedition to the southern ocean, in response to French pirates who had been plying their trade there for many years.¹²³ One of the engineers on board kept a diary that has survived, and contains the following summary information about the Fuegians:

Each family, that is, father and mother, along with those children not yet married, has its pirogue (a canoe made of tree bark), in which they carry everything they need. They sleep at night wherever they find themselves. If there is no ready-made hut, then they build one … They make a small fire in the middle, around which they lie together on grass. When they feel hungry, they cook shellfish, which the eldest man among them distributes in equal portions. The main occupation of the men, indeed their duty, consists in building huts, hunting and fishing; looking after the canoes and gathering shellfish falls to the women … They hunt for whales in the following manner: Five or six canoes put out to sea together, and when they find a whale they pursue it and harpoon it with large arrows whose points made of bone or stone are very skillfully cut … When they kill an animal or a bird, or catch the fish and shellfish that are their regular food, they divide these among all the families, since they are ahead of us in possessing almost all their combined means of subsistence in common.^L

From America we turn to Asia. Here we are told the following about the pygmy tribes of the Mincopie on the Andaman archipelago (in the Gulf of Bengal) by the English researcher E[dward] H[orace] Man, who spent twelve years among them and obtained a more exact knowledge of them than any other European.¹²⁴

The Mincopie are divided into nine tribes, each consisting of a considerable number of small groups of between thirty and fifty individuals, though sometimes as many as 300. Each of these groups has its leader, and the whole tribe has a chief who stands above those of the individual communities. Yet his authority is very limited; it consists principally in holding assemblies of all the communities that belong to his tribe. He is the leader in hunting and fishing and on migrations, and he also settles disputes. Work within each community is done in common, with a division of labor between men and women. Hunting, fishing, obtaining honey, constructing canoes, bows and arrows and other tools falls to the men, while the women bring in wood and water as well as planting food, producing ornaments and cooking. It is the duty of all men and women who stay at home to care for children, the sick and the aged, and to keep the fires going in the various huts; each person capable of work is obliged to work for themselves and the community, and it is also the custom to make sure that there is always a reserve of food to provide for any strangers who may arrive. Small children, the weak and the aged are the special object of general attention, and they have an even better deal in terms of the satisfaction of their daily needs than do the other members of the society.

The consumption of food is governed by definite rules. A married man may only eat together with other married men or bachelors, never with other women or with his own household, unless he is already of a prescribed age. Unmarried people take their meals separately—male youths in one place, girls in another.

The preparation of meals is the customary duty of the women, who see to this while the men are away. But if they are particularly occupied with obtaining wood and water, as on feast days or after a particularly successful hunt, then one of the men does the cooking, and when this is half finished, divides it among those present and leaves the further preparation to them, which they do on their own hearths. If the chief is present, he receives the first and indeed the lion’s share, then come the men and after them the women and children in succession; what remains belongs to the distributor.

In the manufacture of weapons, tools and other articles, the Mincopie generally spend a remarkable time and great diligence, being able to spend hours on end laboriously working a piece of iron with a stone hammer in order to form a spear or arrowhead, to improve the shape of a bow, etc. They devote themselves to these tasks even when no immediate or foreseeable necessity drives them to such efforts. They cannot be accused of greed—it is said of them—as they often present (a misunderstood European expression for “distribute”) the best that they possess, and preserve for their own use objects that are in no way better worked, still less making better ones for themselves.^LI

We conclude this series of examples with a sample from the life of the primitive peoples of Africa. Here, the pygmy Bushmen of the Kalahari desert are frequently taken as an example of extreme backwardness and the lowest stage of human culture. German, English and French researchers agree in saying that the Bushmen live in groups (hordes), conducting their economic life in common. Their small bands are marked by complete equality, in respect of means of subsistence, weapons, etc. The foodstuffs that they find on their travels are collected in sacks that are emptied out in the camp. As the German scholar [Siegfried] Passarge reports: “The day’s harvest then makes its appearance: roots, tubers, fruits, grubs, rhinoceros birds, bullfrogs, turtles, grasshoppers, even snakes and iguanas.”^LII The booty is then divided among all.

The systematic gathering of vegetables, for example fruits, roots, tubers, etc., as well as smaller animals, is the business of women. They have to supply the horde with supplies of this kind, and the children help with this. Men will occasionally also bring back something that they accidentally happen upon, though for them gathering is only a secondary matter. The main task of men is hunting.^LIII

The proceeds of the hunt are consumed by the horde in common. Space and food are provided around the common fire for traveling Bushmen from allied hordes. Passarge, as a good European with the intellectual spectacles of bourgeois society, immediately remarks on the “exaggerated virtue” with which the Bushmen share the last morsel with others—this being a token of their cultural incapability!^LIV

It is apparent, then, that the most primitive peoples, and particularly those far removed from settled existence and agriculture, who stand in a sense at the starting point of the chain of economic development as far as this is known to us from direct observation, offer a quite different picture of relations than we see in Herr Grosse’s schema. What we have on all sides is not “dispersed” and “separate” household economies, but rather strictly regulated economic communities with typical features of communist organization. This is a question of the “lower hunters.” As for the “higher hunters,” the picture of the kinship economy of the Iroquois, as described for us in detail by Morgan, is quite sufficient. But stock-raisers, too, provide sufficient material to give the lie to Grosse’s bold contentions.^LV

The agricultural mark community, accordingly, is not the only primitive communist organization that we find in economic history, but rather the most developed one, not the first but the last. It is not a product of agriculture, but rather of the immeasurably long earlier traditions of communism which, born in the womb of the gens organization, was finally applied to agriculture, where it precisely reached an apogee that heralded its own decline. In no way therefore do the facts confirm Grosse’s schema. If we then ask for an explanation of the remarkable phenomenon of a communism that emerges in the midst of economic history only to immediately disappear again, Herr Grosse offers us, with one of his clever “materialist” explanations:

We have seen in fact that among the lower agriculturalists, the kin group has particularly acquired so much more force and power than among the peoples of other cultural forms, because it appears here initially as a community of dwelling, possession and economy. But the fact that it has taken such a form here is explained in turn by the nature of the lower agricultural economy, which unites people, whereas hunting and stock-raising disperse them.^LVI

Spatial “uniting” or “dispersal” of people in work thus decides whether communism or private property are to prevail. It is a pity that Herr Grosse has forgotten to enlighten us why woods and meadows, in which people are most likely to live “dispersed,” precisely remain common property for longest—in some places down to the present day—whereas the agricultural land on which people “unite” was the earliest to transfer to private ownership. And further, why the form of production that “unites” people more than any other in the whole of economic history, i.e. modern large-scale industry, far from generating any kind of common property, has produced the strictest form of private property, i.e. capitalist property.

We see then that Grosse’s “materialism” is one more proof that it is not enough to talk about “production” and its importance for the whole of social life in order to conceive history from a materialist perspective, and that separated from its other aspect, from its revolutionary idea of development, historical materialism becomes a crude and ungainly wooden crutch, instead of, as with Marx, a stroke of genius of the scientific spirit.

But what this shows above all else is that Herr Grosse, who talks so much about production and its forms, is unclear about the most fundamental concepts of relations of production. We have already seen how what he understands right away by forms of production is such purely external categories as hunting, stock raising and agriculture. But in terms of answering the question as to the form of property within each of these “forms of production”—that is, the question whether there is common property, family ownership or private ownership, and to whom such property belongs—Grosse merely distinguishes between categories such as “landownership” on the one hand and “moveable possessions” on the other. If he finds that these belong to different owners, he then asks which is “more important”: the “moveable” possessions on the one hand, or immoveable landed property on the other. And whichever appears “more important” to Herr Grosse, he takes as decisive for the form of property in this particular society. He decides, for example, that among higher hunters, “moveable possessions have already acquired such an importance” that they are more weighty than landed property; and since moveable possessions such as foodstuffs are private property, Grosse does not recognize any communistic economy here, despite the self-evidence of common property in land.

But distinctions of this kind made according to purely external characteristics—such as those of moveable versus immoveable possessions—do not have the slightest significance for production, and are more or less on the same level as Grosse’s other distinctions—in family forms between male supremacy and female supremacy, or in forms of production between dispersed and uniting activities. “Moveable possessions,” for example, may consist of foodstuffs or raw materials, ornaments and cult objects, or tools. They may be produced for a society’s own use or for exchange. Depending on this, they will have a very different significance for relations of production. In general, Grosse judges the production and property relations of different peoples—and he is here a typical representative of present-day bourgeois society—according to foodstuffs and other objects of consumption in the broadest sense. If he finds that such objects of consumption are possessed and used by individuals, this demonstrates for him the rule of “individual property” among the people in question. This is the typical manner in which primitive communism is “scientifically” refuted today.^LVII According to this profound point of view, a community of beggars which collects and consumes its scanty takings in common, such as is very common in the East, or a band of thieves who enjoy their stolen goods together, are pure examples of a “communistic economic society.” A mark community, on the other hand, which possesses its land in common and works it together, but in which the fruits are consumed on a family basis—each family from its piece of land—is called “an economic community only in a very limited sense.” In short, what is decisive for the character of production from this point of view is the right of ownership over means of consumption and not over means of production, i.e. the conditions of distribution and not those of production. We have reached here a key point in conceptions of political economy, which is fundamentally important for the understanding of all economic history. But we shall now leave Herr Grosse to his fate, and turn our attention to this question in a more general fashion.

4

Anyone who embarks on the study of economic history, and wants to discover the various forms that the economic relations of society have presented in their historical development, must first of all be clear as to what feature of economic relations is to be taken as the touchstone and measure of this development. In order to find one’s way among the wealth of phenomena on any particular terrain, and particularly their historical succession, complete clarity is required as to what element it is that is as it were the inner axis around which the phenomena revolve. The particular element that Morgan, for example, took as the measure of cultural history and touchstone of its present level, was the development of productive technology. In this way he did indeed grasp and reveal the root of the whole cultural existence of humanity. For our purposes here, however, those of economic history, Morgan’s measure is not sufficient. The technology of human labor precisely shows the stage that humans have reached in the mastery of external nature. Each new step in the perfection of productive technology is at the same time a step in the subjugation of physical nature by the human mind, and thereby a step in the development of human culture in general. But if we particularly want to investigate the forms of production in society, the relationship of people to nature is not enough; what we are interested in here is first and foremost a different aspect of human labor, i.e. the relations in which people stand to one another in work; what interests us is not the technology of production but its social organization. For the cultural level of a primitive people it is very important to know that they are familiar with the potter’s wheel and practice pottery. Morgan takes this important advance in technology as the marker of an entire cultural period, which he describes as the transition from savagery to barbarism. But on the basis of this fact we can still judge very little about the form of production of this people. For this we would first have to discover a whole series of conditions, for example who practices pottery in this society, whether all members of the society or only some of them, for example that it is women who supply the community with pots, whether the products of pottery are destined only for the community’s—perhaps a village’s—own use, or rather serve for exchange with others, whether the products of each person who practices pottery are used only by themselves, or whether everything manufactured serves all members of the community in common. We see that there are ramified social connections in a position to determine the character of the form of production in a society: the division of labor, the distribution of products among consumers, exchange. But all these aspects of economic life are themselves determined by one decisive factor, production. The fact that the distribution of products and exchange can only be consequent phenomena is apparent at first glance. So that products can be distributed among consumers, or exchanged, they must first of all be manufactured. Production itself is therefore the first and most important element in a society’s economic life. In the process of production, however, what is decisive is the relations in which those who work stand to their means of production. All work requires particular raw materials, a particular workplace, and then—particular tools. We already know what a high importance the tools of labor and their manufacture assume in the life of human society. Human labor-power intervenes to perform work with these tools and other dead means of production, and to produce the means of consumption, in the broadest sense, that are needed for social life. The relation of those who work to their means of production is the first question of production and its decisive factor. And by this we do not mean the technical relation, not the greater or lesser perfection of the means of production with which people work, nor the way in which they proceed with their work. We mean rather the social relation between human labor-power and the dead means of production, i.e. the question as to whom the means of production belong. In the course of time, this relationship has changed many times. Each time, however, the whole character of production has changed along with this—the pattern of the division of labor, the distribution of products, the direction and scale of exchange, and finally the whole material and intellectual life of society. According to whether those who work possess their means of production in common, or individuals each work for themselves, or do not possess anything but are rather along with the means of production themselves the property of non-workers as means of production, or are chained unfree to the means of production, or as free people who possess no means of production are forced to sell their labor-power as a means of production—we accordingly have either a communist form of production, or a small peasant and handicraft one, or a slave economy, or a feudal economy based on serfdom, or finally a capitalist economy with the wage system. And each of these economic forms has its particular type of division of labor, distribution of products and exchange, as well as its own social, political and intellectual life. It is enough in human economic history for the relationship between those who work and the means of production to radically change, for all other aspects of social, political and intellectual life to change radically as well, so that a whole new society emerges. Of course, there is a continuing interaction between all these aspects of a society’s economic life. Not only does the relationship of labor-power to the means of production influence the division of labor, the distribution of products and exchange, but all of these react in turn on the relation of production. But this kind of action is different. The prevailing kind of division of labor, distribution of wealth and particularly exchange at a given economic stage may gradually undermine the relation between labor-power and the means of production from which they themselves arose. Their form however is only altered if the relation between labor-power and means of production has become obsolete and a radical transformation takes place, a literal revolution. Thus the respective transformations that occur in the relation between labor-power and means of production form the visible great milestones on the road of economic history, they mark out the natural epochs in the economic development of human society.

How important it is for the understanding of economic history to be clear about what is essential in this history is shown by examining the partition of economic history that is most current and most celebrated in German political economy today. We refer to that of Professor Bücher. In his Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft [The Rise of the National Economy], Bücher explains how important a correct partition of economic history into epochs is for its understanding. In pursuit of this task, however, he does not just tackle the question and show us the result of his rational investigations, but rather prepares us first for a proper evaluation of his own work, by holding forth with great complacency on the inadequacy of all his predecessors.

“The first question,” he says,

that the political economist has to raise, if he wants to understand the economy of a people in a remote epoch, will be “Is this economy a national economy? Are its phenomena of the same nature as those of our present-day exchange economy, or are the two different in nature?” Yet this question can only be answered if we do not shy away from investigating the economic phenomena of the past with the same means of conceptual articulation and psychologically isolating deduction that have produced such brilliant results for the economy of the present in the hands of the masters of traditional “abstract” political economy.

We cannot spare the more recent “historical” school the reproach that, instead of penetrating into the nature of earlier economic epochs by the above kind of investigation, it has, almost unnoticed, transferred the customary categories abstracted from the phenomena of the modern national economy to the past, and has spent so long kneading the concepts of exchange economy until they seem applicable to all economic epochs, for better or worse … Nowhere can this be more clearly seen than in the way that the distinctive features of the present economic mode of the civilized peoples are characterized in contrast to the economy of past epochs of peoples of low culture. This is done by proposing so-called stages of development, in indicating which the basic features of the course of development of economic history are summarized in a nutshell … All earlier attempts of this kind suffer from the failing that they do not lead into the essence of things, but stick to the surface.^LVIII

What partitioning of economic history then does Professor Bücher propose? Let us hear.

If we are to grasp this whole development from a single perspective, this can only be a perspective that leads us right into the essential phenomena of political economy, and at the same time also embraces the organizational aspect of earlier economic periods. This is nothing other than the relation in which the production of goods stands to their consumption, recognizable from the length of the path that goods cover from the producer to the consumer. From this perspective, we can divide the whole of economic development into three stages, at least for the peoples of Central and Western Europe, where it can be historically traced with sufficient exactitude:

1. The stage of self-contained domestic economy (pure subsistence production, exchange-less economy), at which goods are consumed in the same economic unit as that in which they are produced;

2. The stage of urban economy (production for clients or stage of direct exchange), at which goods move directly from the producing economic unit to the consuming one;

3. The stage of national economy (commodity production, stage of circulation of goods), at which goods must as a general rule pass through a series of economic units before they are consumed.^LIX

This schema of economic history is interesting first of all for what it does not contain. For Professor Bücher, economic history begins with the mark community of European civilized peoples, thus already with higher agriculture. The whole millennial period of primitive relations of production that preceded higher agriculture, relations in which countless populations still find themselves today, Bücher characterizes, as we know, as “non-economy,” the period of his famous “individual search for food,” and “non-labor.” For Bücher, economic history starts with the final form of primitive communism, in which, with fixed settlement and higher agriculture, the beginnings of the unavoidable break-up and transition to inequality, exploitation and class society are already present. If Grosse contests communism for the whole developmental period prior to the agricultural mark community, Bücher simply strikes this period out of economic history.

The second stage of “self-contained urban economy” is another epoch-making discovery that we owe to the “insight of genius” of the Leipzig professor, as Schurze¹²⁵ would say. If the “self-contained domestic economy,” for example that of a mark community, was characterized by the fact that it embraced a circle of individuals who satisfied all their economic needs within this domestic economy, then in the medieval town of Western and Central Europe—as it is only this that Bücher understands by his “urban economy”—the very opposite was the case. In the medieval town there was no common “economy” of any kind, but rather—to adopt Professor Bücher’s jargon—as many “economies” as there were workshops and households of guild artisans, each of whom produced, sold and consumed for himself—even if under general guild and town rules. But even taken as a whole, the medieval guild town of Germany or France was no “self-contained” economic zone, as its existence was precisely based on reciprocal exchange with the countryside around, from which it drew foodstuffs and raw materials, and for which it manufactured handicraft products. Bücher constructs around each town a self-contained orbit of countryside that he encloses in his “urban economy,” by conveniently reducing exchange between town and country simply to exchange with peasants in the immediate surroundings. And yet the manors of rich feudal lords, who were the best customers for urban trade and who had their seats partly scattered across the countryside far from town, partly within the town—particularly in the imperial and episcopal cities—here, however, forming a distinct economic zone, Bücher leaves entirely out of account, just as he completely ignores foreign trade, which was extremely important for medieval economic relations and particularly for the long-term destiny of cities. As for what was really characteristic of the medieval cities, however, that they were centers of commodity production, which became here for the first time the prevailing form of production, even if on a limited territory, Professor Bücher ignores it. Conversely, for him, commodity production only begins with the “national economy”—as we well know, bourgeois political economy likes to describe the present-day capitalist economic system with this fiction, i.e. as a “stage” in economic life, whereas what is characteristic is precisely that it is not just commodity production, but capitalist production. Grosse calls commodity production simply “industry,” in order to show the superiority of a professor of economics over a mere sociologist.

But let us turn from these side issues to the main question. Professor Bücher presents the “self-contained domestic economy” as the first “stage” of his economic history. What does he understand by this expression? We have already mentioned that this stage begins with the agricultural village community. But besides the primitive mark community, Professor Bücher also counts other historical forms as belonging to the stage of “self-contained domestic economy,” in particular the antique slave economy of the Greeks and Romans, and the medieval feudal manor. The entire economic history of civilized humanity, from its grey dawn through classical antiquity and the whole of the Middle Ages down to the threshold of modern times, is brought together as a single “stage” of production, to which is opposed the medieval European guild town as the second stage, and the present-day capitalist economy as the third stage. Professor Bücher thus classes the communist village community leading its calm existence somewhere in the mountain valleys of the Punjab, the household of Pericles in the heyday of Athenian civilization, and the feudal court of the bishop of Bamberg in the Middle Ages,¹²⁶ as one and the same “economic stage.” But any child with even a superficial knowledge of history from school textbooks will understand that relations that are basically different are being squeezed here into a single category. On the one hand we have in the communistic agricultural communities a general equality of the mass of peasants in possession and law, no class differences or at most very embryonic, while on the other hand, in ancient Greece or Rome as well as in feudal medieval Europe, we have the most glaring development of social classes—freemen and slaves, lords and serfs, the privileged and those with no rights, wealth and poverty or misery. On the one hand the general duty to work, on the other a clear opposition between the enslaved mass of working people and the ruling minority of non-workers. And again, between the ancient slave economy of the Greeks or Romans, and the medieval feudal economy, there is the powerful distinction that ancient slavery eventually led to the downfall of Greco-Roman civilization, whereas medieval feudalism threw up urban guild handicrafts and urban trade, and in this way eventually generated modern capitalism within its womb. Anyone, therefore, who brings under one schema all these economic and social forms, these historical epochs, that are in fact poles apart, must be applying a highly original measure to economic epochs. The measure that Professor Bücher applies, in order to create the night of his “self-contained domestic economy” in which all cats are grey, he himself explains to us, by assisting our understanding with a helpfully bracketed parenthesis. “Exchange-less economy” means that first “stage” stretching from the beginning of written history to the modern age, which is followed by the medieval town as the “stage of direct exchange” and then by the present economic system as the “stage of circulation of goods.” We thus have non-exchange, simple exchange or and complicated exchange—or to put it in more usual terms: absence of trade, simple trade, developed world trade; this is the measure that Professor Bücher applies to economic epochs. The main and basic problem of economic history for him is whether the merchant has already made his appearance or not, whether he is one and the same person as the producer, or a separate person. The professor is very welcome to his “exchange-less economy,” which is nothing more than a professorial fantasy, still not discovered anywhere on earth, and amounting to a historical invention of staggering boldness in being applied to ancient Greece and Rome, or to the feudal Middle Ages from the tenth century on. But to take as measure of the development of production not relations of production but relations of exchange, to take the merchant as the fulcrum of the economic system and the measure of all things, even when he does not yet exist—what a brilliant result of “conceptual articulation, psychological-isolating deduction,” and above all, what “penetration into the essence of the matter,” which scorns “sticking to the surface”! Isn’t the old undemanding schema of the “historical school,” the partition of economic history into three epochs of “natural economy, money economy and credit economy,” much better and closer to reality than the pretentious personal fabrication of Professor Bücher, who not only turns up his nose at all “previous attempts of this kind,” but takes as his own basic idea the same rejected “sticking to the surface” of exchange, distorting it by his pedantic word-spinning into a completely inappropriate schema?

“Sticking to the surface” of economic history is indeed no accident with bourgeois science. Some bourgeois scholars, such as Friedrich List, partition economic history according to the outward nature of the most important sources of food, proposing epochs of hunting, stock raising, agriculture and industry—partitions that are not even adequate for an external history of civilization. Others, such as Professor [Bruno] Hildebrand, partition economic history according to the outward form of exchange, into natural economy, money economy and credit economy, or else, like Bücher, into an exchange-less economy, an economy with direct exchange and one with commodity exchange.¹²⁷ Still others, like Grosse, take as their starting-point for judging economic forms the distribution of goods. In a word, the scholars of the bourgeoisie push to the forefront of historical consideration exchange, distribution, consumption—everything except the social form of production, which is precisely what is decisive in every historical epoch, and from which exchange and its various forms, distribution and consumption with their particular features, always follow as logical consequences. Why is that? For the same reason that moves them to present the “national economy” i.e. the capitalist mode of production, as the highest and final stage of human history, and to dispute its further world-economic development and associated revolutionary tendencies. The social pattern of production, that is, the question of the relationship of those who work to the means of production, is the core point of each economic epoch, but it is the sore point of every class society. The alienation of means of production from the hands of those who work, in one or another form, is the common foundation of all class society, since it is the basic condition of all exploitation and class rule. To divert attention from this sore point, and focus on everything external and secondary, is not so much a deliberate effort on the part of bourgeois scholars as rather the instinctive refusal of the class whose intellectual representatives they are to eat the dangerous fruit of the tree of knowledge. And a thoroughly modern and celebrated professor such as Bücher shows this class instinct with his “insight of genius,” when with a wave of the hand he forces such major epochs as primitive communism, slavery and serfdom, with their fundamentally different types of relation of labor-power to the means of production, into one little box of his schema, while permitting himself elaborate hair-splitting in relation to the history of trade, distinguishing with pedantic self-importance, and holding up to the light, “domestic work (in brackets: domestic tasks),” “wage work,” “handicraft,” “work on the customer’s premises,” and similar fatuous rubbish. The ideologists of the exploited masses, the first communists, the earliest representatives of socialism, also wandered in darkness and remained in limbo with their preaching of equality among men, so long as they directed their accusations and struggle principally against unjust distribution, or—like some socialists in the nineteenth century—against modern forms of exchange. Only after the best leaders of the working class realized that the forms of distribution and exchange themselves depend on the organization of production, for which the relationship of working people to the means of production is decisive, only then were socialist strivings placed on a firm scientific footing. And on the basis of this unitary conception, the scientific position of the proletariat is distinguished from that of the bourgeoisie in its approach to economic history, just as it is in relation to political economy. If it lies in the class interest of the bourgeoisie to conceal the crux of economic history—the pattern of the relationship of labor-power to the means of production—and its changing historical character, the interest of the proletariat is conversely to bring this relationship to the fore and make it the measure of a society’s economic structure. And for this it is not merely indispensable for workers to bear in mind the great milestones of history that divide the ancient communistic society from subsequent class society, but equally too the distinctions between the various historical forms of class society themselves. Only by being clear about the specific economic peculiarities of primitive communist society, and the no less particular features of the ancient slave economy and medieval serfdom, is it possible to grasp with due thoroughness why today’s capitalist class society offers for the first time a historical leverage for the realization of socialism, and what the fundamental distinction is between the world socialist economy of the future and the primitive communist groups of primitive times.

IV. MATERIAL ON ECONOMIC HISTORY (II)

1

Let us take a look at one of the mark communities that has been researched most thoroughly in terms of its internal structures—the German.

As we know, the Germans settled by tribes and clans. In each clan, the male head of the household was allocated a building site along with a plot of land in order to set up house and farm there. A portion of the land was then used for agriculture, and each family would obtain a lot on it. It is true that according to Caesar,¹²⁸ around the beginning of the Christian era, one tribe of Germans (the Suevi or Swabians) cultivated their farmland collectively without first partitioning it among the families; yet yearly repartitioning of the lots was already a common practice when the Roman historian Tacitus wrote, in the second century CE.¹²⁹ In isolated regions, such as around Frickhofen in Nassau,¹³⁰ yearly repartitioning still survived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century, it was still the custom in a few regions of the Bavarian Palatinate¹³¹ and on the Rhine to draw lots for farmland, although they took place at longer intervals: every three, four, nine, twelve, fourteen or eighteen years. This land, in other words, was definitively turned into private property only around the middle of the last century. In a few regions of Scotland as well, there was repartitioning of farmland up until recently. All of the lots were originally the same size, matching the average needs of a family as well as the potential yield of the soil and the labor available. Depending on the quality of soil in the various regions, they amounted to fifteen, thirty, forty or more Morgen of land.¹³² In most parts of Europe, the lots were passed down by inheritance through individual families, as the repartitioning of land became rare and eventually fell out of practice in the fifth and sixth centuries. Still, this only applied to the farms. All of the land that was left over—woodland, meadows, bodies of water and unused parts—remained the unpartitioned, collective property of the mark. From the yield of the woodland, for example, the needs of the community were negotiated and what remained was distributed.

The pastures were used in common. This unpartitioned mark or common land survived for a very long time; it still exists today in the Bavarian Alps, Switzerland and the Tyrol, as well as in France (in the Vendée¹³³), in Norway and Sweden.

In order to ensure complete equality in the partitioning of farmland, the land was first divided by quality and situation into a few fields,¹³⁴ and each field was cut into several narrow strips corresponding to the number of mark members. If a member of the mark had doubts about whether he had received an equal share, he was allowed at any time to call for a new measurement of the total land. Anyone who resisted him was punished.

But even after periodic repartitioning and allocation by lot fell into disuse, the work of all members of the mark community, including farm work, remained totally communal and subject to strict regulation by the collectivity. This meant above all the general obligation of everyone possessing a share of the mark to work. Residency alone was not enough to be an actual member of the mark. For this, each person not only had to live in the mark, but also had to cultivate his holding himself. Anyone who failed to cultivate his portion of land for a number of years lost it for good, and the mark could hand it over to someone else to cultivate. Work itself was also under the direction of the mark. In the early period after the Germans established settlements, the centerpiece of their economic life was stock raising, conducted on communal fields and meadows under communal village herdsmen. They used fallow land as pasture for livestock, as well as farmland after the harvest. This followed already from the fact that the times for seeding and harvest, the alternation between tilling and fallow years for each field, and the sequence of sowings, were collectively decided and everyone had to comply with the general arrangement. Each field was surrounded by a fence with gates, and was closed from seedtime until harvest; the opening and closing dates of the field were decided by the entire village. Each field had an overseer, or field guardian, who had to uphold the prescribed arrangement as a public official of the mark. The so-called field processions of whole villages were organized as festivals; children were also brought to these, and given a box on the ear to make them remember the boundaries and be able to attest to them later on.

Stock raising was conducted in common, and the members of the mark were not allowed to keep individual herds. All the village’s animals were divided into common herds according to the kind of animal, each with its own village herdsman and an animal to lead the herd. It was also decided that the herds should have bells. In each mark, the right to hunt and fish anywhere on its territory was also common. No snares could be laid, nor any pits dug, without first notifying the rest of the community. Mineral ore and the like that was dug out of the subsoil of the mark from deeper than a ploughshare belonged to the community and not to the individual finder. The craftsmen needed to reside in each mark. Each farming family, indeed, made most of the items they needed for everyday life themselves. They baked, brewed, spun and wove at home. Yet certain crafts became specialized early on, especially those having to do with the manufacture of farm implements. Thus, in the woodland community of Wölpe in Lower Saxony,¹³⁵ the members of the mark were to “have a man of each craft in the forest to make useful things from wood.”^LX Everywhere, it was decided what amount and kind of wood the craftsmen were to use, in order to protect the forest and use only what was necessary for the members of the mark. The craftsmen received their necessities from the mark and generally lived the same way as the mass of other peasants. Yet they did not have full rights, partly because they were transient and not an indigenous element, and partly, which comes to the same thing, because their main business was not agriculture, which was then the center of gravity of economic life, around which public life and the laws and duties of the mark members revolved.^LXI It was not possible, therefore, for just anyone to join the mark community. The acceptance of an outsider had to be unanimously approved by all of the members of the mark. Anyone who wanted to transfer their lot could do so only to another mark member, never an outsider, and only before the mark tribunal.

At the head of the mark community was the Dorfgraf or village mayor, in other places called the Markmeister or Centener. He was chosen for this position by the mark members. Not only was this an honor for the chosen individual, but also a duty; refusal would be penalized. With the passage of time, the office of mark president became hereditary in certain families, and because of its power and income, it was then only a small step before this office could be bought, with the land becoming a fiefdom, so that the position developed from that of a purely democratic elected leader of the community into a tool for its domination. In the heyday of the mark community, however, the mark president was simply the executor of the wishes of the collectivity. The assembly of the mark members regulated all communal affairs, reconciled disputes and imposed punishments. The entire system of agricultural work, paths and buildings as well as the field and village policing, were all decided by majority in the assembly. The assembly was also responsible for calculating from the “mark books,” which had to be kept on the mark’s business. Maintaining the peace and administering justice within the mark were carried out under the chairmanship of the mark president by those in attendance (the “court of jurisdiction”), who rendered judgments orally and publicly. Only members of the mark were allowed to attend the tribunal; outsiders were denied entry. The members of the mark were sworn to help and attest to one another, being generally required to assist one another in a brotherly and loyal manner in case of emergency, fire, or enemy attack. In the army, mark members formed their own battalions and fought side by side. No one was allowed to abandon his comrade to an enemy spear. When crimes and damages occurred in the mark or were committed by a member of the mark against an outsider, the whole mark banded together in solidarity. Members of the mark were also obliged to harbor travelers and to support the needy. Each mark originally formed a religious community, and after the introduction of Christianity—which in the case of the Germanic and Saxon peoples was quite late, only in the ninth century—the community was a religious congregation. Finally, the mark typically kept a schoolteacher for all the village youth.

It is impossible to imagine anything simpler and more harmonious than the economic system of the old Germanic mark. The entire mechanism of social life here is open to view. A strict plan and a tight organization cover everything each individual does and place him as a part of the whole. The immediate needs of everyday life, and the equal satisfaction of everyone, is the starting point and end point of the whole organization. Everyone works together for everyone else and collectively decides on everything. But what does this organization spring from, what is it based on, this power of the collective over the individual? It is nothing other than the communism of land and soil, that is to say, the common possession of the most important means of production by those who work. The typical characteristics of the agrarian-communistic economic organization can be brought out more easily if they are studied comparatively at an international level, so that it can be grasped as a global form of production in all its diversity and flexibility.

Let us turn to the old Inca Empire in South America. The territory of this empire, which consisted of the present-day republics of Peru, Bolivia and Chile, an area of 3,364,600 square kilometers with a present population of twelve million inhabitants,¹³⁶ was organized at the time of the Spanish conquest under [Francisco] Pizarro in the same way it had been for many centuries before. We find here right away the same arrangements as among the ancient Germans. Each clan community, around a hundred men capable of bearing weapons, occupied a particular area that henceforth belonged to them as their marca, even this term curiously resembling the German.¹³⁷ The mark’s farmland was separated off, divided into portions and allocated annually to families by lot before the sowing of crops. The size of the portions was determined by family size, i.e. according to their needs. The village leader, whose position had already developed from an elected one into a hereditary one by the time of the formation of the Inca Empire in the tenth and eleventh centuries,¹³⁸ received the largest allotted share. In northern Peru, the male heads of household did not all cultivate their plots of land themselves, but worked in groups of ten under the direction of a leader—an arrangement that resembles certain aspects of the Germanic structure. This ten-man group cultivated in rotation the lots of all of its members, including those who were absent, on war service, or doing corvée labor for the Incas. Each family received the products that grew on its lot. Only those who lived in the marca and belonged to the clan had the right to a plot of land. Yet everyone was also obliged to cultivate his plot himself. Anyone who let his field lie fallow for a certain number of years (in Mexico, it was three) lost his claim to his land. The plots could not be sold or given away. It was strictly forbidden to leave one’s own marca and settle in another one, this fact probably being connected to the strict blood ties of the village tribes.

Agriculture in the coastal regions, where there is only periodic rainfall, always required artificial irrigation by means of canals, which were constructed by the collective labor of the entire marca. There were strict rules governing the use of water and its distribution, both between different villages and within them. Each village also had “paupers’ fields,” which were cultivated by all the members of the marca and whose products the village leaders distributed among the elderly, widows, and other needy individuals. All land outside the tilled fields was marcapacha (common land). In the mountainous region of the country, where agriculture could not thrive, there was modest livestock farming, consisting almost exclusively of llamas, the basis of existence for these inhabitants, who periodically brought their main product, wool, down to the valley in order to trade it with the peasants for corn, pepper and beans. At the time of the conquest there were already private herds and significant differences in wealth in the mountain regions. An average member of the mark probably owned between three and ten llamas, while a chief might have between fifty and a hundred. Only the forest, soil and pasture were common property there, and as well as private herds there were village ones, which could not be divided up. At certain times, some of the communal herd were slaughtered and the meat and wool divided among the families. There were no specialized craftsmen; each family made the necessary household items itself. There were, however, villages with special skill in a certain craft, whether as weavers, potters, or metal workers. At the head of the village was the village leader, originally an elected office but later a hereditary one, who oversaw the cultivation, but in every important matter he consulted with the assembly of all adults, which was called together by sounding a conch shell.

Thus far, the ancient Peruvian marca offers a faithful copy of the German mark community in all essential characteristics. Yet it offers us more in our investigation of the essence of this social system by deviating from the pattern we already know, than it does in its similarities. What was unique in the old Inca Empire is that it was a conquered land on which foreign rule was established. The immigrant conquerors, the Incas, were indeed an Indian tribe, yet they were able to subjugate the peaceful Quechua¹³⁹ tribes who lived there because of the isolation in which these lived in their villages, concerned only with their own marca and its boundaries, unconnected to any larger territory, and uninterested in anything that existed or occurred beyond their own borders. This extremely particularistic social organization, which made the Inca conquest so effortless, was barely touched or altered by the Incas themselves. Yet they did graft onto it a refined system of economic exploitation and political domination. Each conquered marca had to give up a part of its own land for “Inca fields” and “fields of the sun.” Though these continued to belong to it, their products had to be turned over to the ruling Inca tribe and its priestly caste. Similarly, they had to reserve a portion of their livestock in the mountainous marcas as “herds of the masters” and mark them as such. The protection of these herds as well as the cultivation of the fields for the Incas and their priests was based upon the compulsory labor of all members of the marca. On top of this there was compulsory labor for mining, likewise for public works such as road and bridge construction under the control of the rulers; a strictly disciplined military service; and finally a tribute of young girls, who were used by the Incas for ritual sacrifice or as concubines. This tight system of exploitation, however, did not interfere with the internal life of the marca and its communist-democratic organization; even the compulsory labor and dues were borne communistically as a collective burden of the mark. Yet what is remarkable is that this communistic village organization did not simply prove a solid and amenable basis for a centuries-long system of exploitation and servitude, as so often happens in history, but that this system was itself organized on a communistic basis. The Incas who ensconced themselves on the backs of the subjugated Peruvian tribes themselves also lived in clan groups with mark-type relations. Their capital, the town of Cuzco, was simply a combination of a dozen or two collective quarters, each the seat of a communistic household for a whole clan, complete with a communal burial area, and a common cult as well. Around these tribal houses lay the mark regions of the Inca clans, with unpartitioned forests and pastures and partitioned farmland, which was likewise cultivated in common. Being a primitive people, these exploiters and rulers had not yet renounced work themselves; they used their position of domination only to live better than the dominated and to make more opulent sacrificial offerings. The modern art of having one’s food supplied by other people’s labor and making refusal to work an attribute of domination was still foreign to the nature of this social organization, in which collective property and the general duty to work were deep-seated customs. The exercise of political domination was also organized as a collective function of the Inca clans. The Inca governors appointed to the Peruvian provinces, analogous in their role to the Dutch residents of the Malaysian archipelago, were seen as delegates of their clans in Cuzco, where they retained residency in the collective quarters and participated in their own mark community. Each year, these delegates returned home for the Sun Festival in Cuzco¹⁴⁰ to render an account of their official activities and to celebrate the great religious festival with their fellow clansmen.

What we have here, as it were, is two social strata, one above the other yet both internally communistic in their organization, standing in a relationship of exploitation and subjugation. This phenomenon may seem incomprehensible at first, being as it is in stark contradiction with the principles of equality, brotherhood and democracy that form the basis of the organization of the mark community. But we also have here living proof of just how little in reality the primitive communist structures had to do with general freedom and equality. These expanded, generically valid “principles” applying to all abstract “human beings,” or all people of the “civilized” countries, i.e., countries of capitalist civilization, were only a late product of modern bourgeois society, whose revolutions—in America as well as France—proclaimed them for the first time. Primitive communist society knew no such general principles for all human beings; their equality and solidarity grew out of the traditions of common blood ties and out of common ownership of the means of production. As far as these blood ties and common ownership reached, so too did the equality of rights and solidarity of interests. Whatever lay beyond these limits—which were no wider than the walls of a village, or at most the territorial boundaries of a tribe—was foreign and could even be hostile. Indeed, each community based on economic solidarity could and necessarily was periodically driven into deadly conflicts of interest with similarly constructed communities because of the low level of development of production, or because of the scarcity or exhaustion of food sources due to an increase in population. Brute struggle, war, had to decide, and its result often meant the eradication of one of the contending parties, or more frequently, the establishment of a system of exploitation. It was not devotion to abstract principles of equality and freedom that formed the basis of primitive communism, but the pitiless necessities of a low level of human civilization, the helplessness of humanity in the face of external nature, which forced them to stick closely together in larger alliances, and to act methodically and collectively with respect to labor and the struggle for life as an absolute condition of existence. Yet it was also the same limited control over nature that confined planning and action with respect to labor to a relatively quite small area of natural pasture or reclaimable village settlements, and made this unsuitable for collective action on a larger scale. The primitive state of agriculture at that time did not allow for any larger cultivation than that of a village mark, and for this reason presented strict limits to the solidarity of interests. And finally, it was the same inadequate development of labor productivity that also generated periodic conflicts of interest among the various social alliances, thereby making brute force the only means to solve such conflicts. War thus became a permanent method for solving conflicts of interest between social communities, a method that would prevail through to the highest development of labor productivity—the total domination of man over nature—that will put an end to material conflicts of interest between people. If clashes between different primitive communist societies were indeed a common occurrence, it was the development of labor productivity at the time that decided the outcome. When there was a conflict between two nomadic, herding peoples who had come into conflict over livestock pastures, only brute force could determine who would remain master of the land and who would be driven into drought-ridden, inhospitable regions or even be exterminated. Yet wherever agriculture was already sufficiently flourishing to nourish people well and securely, without taking up the entire labor force and the entire lifetime of these individuals, there was also the foundation for a systematic exploitation of these peasants by foreign conquerors. And this explains the relations that emerge, as in Peru, when one communistic community establishes itself as the exploiter of another.

The unique structure of the Inca Empire is important because it offers us the key to understanding a whole series of similar patterns in classical antiquity, especially those in the earliest period of Greek history. If, for example, we have a brief surviving account how on the island of Crete, which was ruled by the Dorians,¹⁴¹ the subjugated people had to hand over their entire harvest, less the sustenance required for themselves and their families, to the community, to cover the communal meals of the free men (the ruling Dorians); or that in Sparta, likewise a Dorian community, there were “state slaves” or Helots,¹⁴² who were given “from the state” to individuals to work their farmland, at first this kind of thing presents a puzzle. And a bourgeois scholar, Professor Max Weber in Heidelberg, proposes a curious hypothesis based on the standpoint of present-day condition and concepts, in order to explain these curious historical phenomena:

The dominated population is treated here [in Sparta—R.L.] in the same manner as in state slavery or bondage. The sustenance of the warriors is deducted from agricultural production, partly in the collective manner that we have already mentioned, and partly in such a way that the individual is dependent on the yield of certain plots of land worked by slaves that are allocated to him, which are appropriated in one way or another, later increasingly through inheritance. New allocations of lots and other kinds of distribution were historically considered to be practicable and appear to have occurred. Naturally, they are not reallocation of farmland [“natural” is not something a bourgeois professor should concede, regardless of what it is about—R.L.] but rather a kind of reallocation of ground rent. Military considerations, especially a military population policy, determine all the particulars … The urban-feudal character of this politics is characteristically expressed in the way that in Gortyn,¹⁴³ the plots of land occupied by serfs in the estate of a free man are subject to military law: they form the kleros,¹⁴⁴ which is bound to the maintenance of the military family.

Translated from the academic into regular speech: the farmlands are the property of the whole community and thus may not be sold nor distributed after the death of the owner. Professor Weber explains this at another point as a wise measure “to prevent the fragmentation of wealth” and “in the interest of maintaining lots appropriate for the class of warriors.”

The organization culminates in a mess-like community dinner table of the warriors, the “syssities,”¹⁴⁵ and in the communal education of children by the state, in order to make them into warriors.^LXII

In this way the Greeks of the heroic age, the age of Hector and Achilles—who happily possess the notions of annuities [Rentenanstalten] and the Prussian Fideikommis,¹⁴⁶ of officers’ messes with their “class appropriate” champagne toasts—the blossoming, naked boys and girls of Sparta who enjoyed a national education, are all transformed into a jail-like institution for cadets such as that at Gross-Lichterfelde near Berlin.¹⁴⁷

The relations described above will not present much difficulty for someone familiar with the internal structure of the Inca Empire. They are undoubtedly the product of a similarly blatantly parasitic dual structure that has emerged from the subjugation of an agricultural mark community by another communistic community. The extent to which the communistic foundation remains in the customs of the rulers as well as in the situation of the subjugated depends on the stage of development, the length and the environment of this pattern, all of which can offer a whole range of gradations. The Inca Empire, where the rulers themselves still labor, where the landownership of the subjects as a whole is not yet touched and each social stratum is cohesively organized, can indeed be viewed as the original form of such exploitative relations, which was only able to preserve itself for centuries thanks to the country’s relatively primitive level of culture and isolation from the rest of the world. The historical information on Crete, drawn from traditional sources, suggests an advanced stage where the subjugated peasant community had to hand over all the fruits of its labor less what was needed for its own subsistence, where the ruling community lived not from their own labor in the fields, but from the dues paid to them by the exploited mark community, although this still had its own consumption in common. In Sparta we find—at a further stage of development—that the land is no longer seen as belonging to the subjugated community, but is rather the property of the rulers, being repartitioned and allotted by lot among themselves in the manner of the mark community. The social organization of the subjugated is shattered by the loss of its foundation, ownership of the land; they themselves become the property of the ruling community, who communistically, or “for the sake of the state,” hand over the landless to individual mark members as laborers. The ruling Spartans themselves continue to live in strict relations characteristic of the mark community. And similar relations are supposed to have prevailed to a certain degree in Thessaly,¹⁴⁸ where the previous inhabitants, the Penestai or “poor people,” were subjugated by the Aeolians,¹⁴⁹ or in Bithynia, where the Mariandynoi were placed in a similar situation by Thracian tribes.¹⁵⁰ Such a parasitic existence, however, constantly led to the seeds of disintegration being also brought into the ruling community. Conquest, and the imperative to establish exploitation as a permanent structure, already leads to a considerable development of the military apparatus, as we see in both the Inca state and the Spartan ones. This is the first precondition for inequality, for the formation of privileged classes, in the womb of the originally free and equal mass of peasants. It only requires favorable geographical and cultural-historical circumstances, which arouse more refined needs by contact with more civilized peoples and brisk trade, in order for inequality to make rapid progress even within the ruling classes, for the communistic cohesion to weaken, and for private property to enter the field with its division of rich and poor. The early history of the Greek world, after its contact with the civilized peoples of the Orient, is a classic example of such a development. Thus, the result of the subjugation of one early communistic society by another, whether sooner or later, is always the same: the unraveling of communistic, traditional social bonds among both the rulers and the ruled, and the birth of a totally new social formation in which private property along with inequality and exploitation, each engendering the other, enter the world right away. And thus the history of the old mark community in classical antiquity leads, on the one hand, to the opposition between a mass of indebted small peasants and an aristocracy that has appropriated military service, public offices, trade and the undivided communal lands as large-scale landed property; and on the other hand, to the opposition between this whole society of free people and the exploited slaves. It was only one step from this differentiated natural economy based on communal exploitation of a people subjected militarily to introducing the purchase of individual slaves. And this step was taken quickly in Greece by virtue of maritime and international trade, with its effects in the coastal and island states. [Ettore] Ciccotti also distinguishes between two types of slavery: “The oldest, most significant and most widespread form of economic servitude,” he says,

which we see at the threshold of Greek history, is not slavery, but a form of bondage that I would almost like to call vassalage. According to Theopompus [of Chios]: “Among all Hellenes after the Thessalians and the Lacedaemonians,¹⁵¹ the inhabitants of the island of Chios in Asia Minor were the first to use slaves, but they did not acquire them in the same manner as others … It is clear that the Lacedaemonians and Thessalians formed their slave class out of Hellenes who previously inhabited this part of the world they now owned, so that they forced the Achaeans, Thessalians, Perrebes¹⁵² and Magnetes¹⁵³ into servitude and named these subjugated peoples Helots and Penestai. In contrast, the inhabitants of Chios acquired barbarian non-Greeks as slaves and paid a price for them.”

And the reason for this distinction, Ciccotti correctly points out,

lay in the different level of development of the inland peoples on the one hand and the island peoples on the other. Complete absence or a very low degree of accumulation of wealth, along with the weak development of commercial trade, in the one case excluded a direct and growing production on the part of the owners as well as their direct employment of slaves, leading instead to the more rudimentary form of tribute and to a division of labor and formation of a class system that created a body of armed soldiers out of the ruling class and a farming peasantry out of the subjugated peoples.^LXIII

The internal organization of the Peruvian Inca state reveals to us an important aspect of this primitive social form, indicating at the same time a particular historic process of its downfall. A different turn in the fate of this social form will appear when we trace the subsequent episode in the history of the Peruvian Indians as well as that of the other Spanish colonies in America. Here we particularly encounter a completely new method of domination, which had no parallel with the Inca rulers, for example. The Spanish, the first Europeans in the New World, began their rule with the relentless extermination of the subjugated population. According to the reports of the Spanish themselves, the number of Indians exterminated in the space of only a few years after the discovery of America reached a total of between twelve and fifteen million. “We believe it justified to maintain,” [Bartolomé de] Las Casas says, “that the Spanish, through their monstrous and inhuman treatment, have exterminated twelve million people, among them women and children.”¹⁵⁴ He further states, “In my personal opinion, the number of those natives murdered in this period exceeded even fifteen million.”^LXIV “On the island of Haiti,” says [Heinrich Gottfried] Handelmann, “the number of natives before the Spanish encountered them in 1492 was around one million; by 1508 only sixty thousand of these million people remained, and nine years later there were only fourteen thousand, so that the Spanish had to resort to introducing Indians from the neighboring islands in order to have enough working hands. In 1508 alone, forty thousand natives from the Bahamas were transported to the island of Haiti and made into slaves.”^LXV The Spanish regularly hunted down the redskins, as described for us by an eyewitness and participant, the Italian Girolamo Benzoni. “In part because of a lack of food, and in part out of fear following separation from their fathers, mothers, and children,” says Benzoni after one such manhunt on the island of Kumagna, in which four thousand Indians were captured,

the majority of the enslaved natives died on the way to the port of Cumana.¹⁵⁵ Each time that one of the slaves was too tired to march as quickly as his comrades, the Spanish stabbed him in the back with their daggers, inhumanly murdering him out of fear that he wanted to remain in order to lead a counterattack. It was a heart-breaking scene to see these poor souls, totally naked, tired, wounded and so exhausted from hunger that they could hardly stand on their feet. Iron chains bound their necks, hands and feet. There was not a virgin among them who would not be raped by these robbers, who were so addicted to this repulsive debauchery that many of them remained marred by syphilis forever … All the natives taken as slaves were branded with hot irons. The captains then took a number of them for themselves, dividing the rest among the soldiers. They either gambled them away to one another or sold them to Spanish colonists. Merchants who traded this commodity for wine, flour, sugar and other daily necessities, transported the slaves to those parts of the Spanish colonies where there was the greatest demand for them. During their transport, a number of these unfortunates died from lack of water and the bad air in the cabins, which was due to the fact that the traders herded the slaves into the lowest level of the ship without giving them enough water to drink or enough air to breathe.^LXVI

However, in order to relieve themselves of the trouble of pursuing the Indians and the cost of buying them, the Spanish created a system known as repartimientos in their West Indian possessions and on the American mainland.¹⁵⁶ The entire conquered area was divided by the governors into districts, whose village leaders, caciques, were themselves obliged to supply on demand the number of natives for slavery requested by the Spanish. Each Spanish colonist periodically received the requested number of slaves that were delivered to him by the governor under the condition that he “take the trouble to convert them to Christianity.”^LXVII The abuse of the slaves by the colonists defied all understanding. Suicide became a salvation for the Indians. “All of the natives captured by the Spanish,” according to one witness,

were forced by them to do hard and exhausting labor in the mines, away from their homes and families and under constant threat of beatings. No wonder that thousands of slaves saw no other possibility than to escape from their gruesome fate by not only violently taking their own lives, by hanging or drowning themselves or in other ways, but first also murdering their wives and children, in order to end an unfortunate and inescapable situation for everyone all at once. In other cases, women resorted to aborting their children in the womb or avoiding sexual contact with men so that they did not have to bear slaves.^LXVIII

Through the intervention of the imperial confessor, the pious Father Garcia [Juan] de Loaysa, the colonists were finally able to have a decree issued by the Hapsburg emperor, Charles V,¹⁵⁷ summarily declaring the Indians to be hereditary slaves of the Spanish colonists. Benzoni in fact says the decree only applied to Caribbean cannibals,¹⁵⁸ but was extended and applied to all Indians in general. In order to justify their atrocities, the Spanish systematically spread dramatic horror stories about cannibalism and other vices of the Indians so that a contemporary French historian, Marly de Châtel, in his “General History of the West Indies” (Paris 1569)¹⁵⁹ could write of them: “God punished them with slavery for their evil and vice, since not even Ham sinned against his father Noah¹⁶⁰ to the degree of the Indians against the Holy Father.”^LXIX And around the same time the Spaniard [José de] Acosta wrote in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Barcelona, 1591) about these same Indians, that they were a “good-natured people who are always ready to prove themselves of service to the Europeans; a people who, in their behavior, show such a touching harmlessness and sincerity, that those not completely stripped of all humanity could not treat them in any other way than with tenderness and love.”^LXX

Naturally, there were also attempts to stop the horror. In 1531, Pope Paul III published a bull decreeing that the Indians were members of the human race and therefore free from slavery. The Spanish Imperial Council for the West Indies also made a declaration against slavery, but the need for these repeated decrees testified more to the fruitlessness of these attempts than to their sincerity.

What freed the Indians from slavery was neither the pious actions of the Catholic clergy nor the protests of the Spanish kings, but rather the simple fact that the Indians’ mental and physical constitution rendered them worthless for hard slave labor. Against this bare impossibility, the worst cruelty of the Spanish did not help in the long run; the redskins died under slavery like flies, fled, took their own lives—in short, the entire business was thoroughly unprofitable. And only when the warm and untiring defender of the Indians, Bishop Las Casas, hit upon the idea of importing the more robust Africans as slaves in place of the unfit Indians, were the useless experiments with the Indians immediately abandoned. This practical discovery had a quicker and more thorough effect than all of Las Casas’s pamphlets on the cruelties of the Spanish. The Indians were freed from slavery after a few decades and the enslavement of the Negroes began, which would last for four more centuries. At the end of the eighteenth century a respectable German, “good old [Joachim Christian] Nettelbeck” from Kolberg, was the captain of a ship taking hundreds of Africans from Guinea to Guyana in South America, where other “good East Prussians” exploited plantations and sold slaves along with other goods from Africa, herding them into the lowest parts of the ship, as the Spanish captains had done in the sixteenth century. The progress of the humanitarian era of the Enlightenment showed itself in the way that Nettelbeck, to alleviate their melancholy and to keep them from dying off, allowed the slaves to dance on the ship’s deck with music and whip cracks every evening, something to which the more brutal Spanish traders had not yet resorted. And in 1871, in the late nineteenth century, the noble David Livingstone, who had spent thirty years in Africa searching for the sources of the Nile, wrote in his famous letters to the American [James] Gordon Bennett:

And if my disclosures regarding the terrible Ujijian¹⁶¹ slavery should lead to the suppression of the east coast slave trade, I shall regard that as a greater matter by far than the discovery of all the Nile sources together. Now that you have done with domestic slavery forever, lend us your powerful aid toward this great object. This fine country is blighted, as with a curse from above …¹⁶²

Yet the lot of the Indians in the Spanish colonies was not made significantly better by this transformation. A new system of colonization simply took the place of the old one. Instead of repartimientos, which were created for the direct enslavement of the population, the so-called encomiendas¹⁶³ were introduced.^LXXI Formally, the inhabitants were awarded personal freedom and full property rights to their land. But these areas were under the administrative direction of the Spanish colonists, in particular in the hands of the descendants of the first conquistadores, and these encomenderos were to be the guardians of the Indians, who were for their part declared to be legal minors. The encomenderos were supposed to spread Christianity among the Indians. To cover the cost of constructing churches for the natives and as compensation for their labor as guardians, the encomenderos legally acquired the right to demand “moderate payments in money and in kind” from the population. These provisions soon were enough to make the encomiendas hell for the Indians. The land was indeed left to them as the undivided property of the tribes, but the Spanish only understood, or only wanted to understand, this to be farmland, land that was under the plough. The undivided mark as well as unused lands, often even fields left to lie fallow, were taken over by the Spanish as “waste land.” And they did this with such thoroughness and shamelessness that [Alonzo de] Zurita wrote on this subject:

There is not a parcel of land, not a farm, that was not determined to be the property of the Europeans, without regard for the encroachments onto the interests and the property rights of the natives, who were thus forced to leave this land, which had been inhabited by them since ancient times. Cultivated land was often seized from them, under the pretext that this was being utilized only to prevent its acquisition by the Europeans. Thanks to this system, in some provinces the Spanish expanded their property so widely that the natives had no land left to cultivate themselves.^LXXII

At the same time, the “moderate” payments were increased so shamelessly by the encomenderos that the Indians were crushed under them. “All of the belongings of the Indian,” Zurita says,

are not enough to pay the taxes that are levied on him. You meet many people among the redskins whose assets do not even come to one peso and who live from daily wage-labor; these unfortunates, accordingly, having nothing left with which to support their families. This is the reason why so often young people prefer sexual relations out of wedlock, especially when their parents do not even have four or five reales at their disposal. The Indians can scarcely afford the luxury of clothing themselves; many who have no resources to buy themselves clothes are not able to take communion. It is no wonder, then, that the majority of them become desperate, since they cannot find any way to acquire the food needed for their families … During my early travels, I discovered that many Indians hanged themselves out of despair, after explaining to their wives and children that they were doing this in the face of the impossibility of meeting the taxes demanded of them.^LXXIII

Finally, in addition to increasing land theft and pressure of taxation, came forced labor. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Spanish openly returned to the system that had been formally abandoned in the sixteenth century. Though slavery was abolished for the Indians, in its place came a unique system of forced wage labor, which did not significantly differ from the system that preceded it. Already in the mid-sixteenth century, Zurita portrays for us the situation of the Indian wage laborers under the Spanish in the following way:

The whole time, the Indians received no other nourishment than cornbread … The encomendor has them work from morning to night, naked in the morning and evening frosts, in storms and thunder, without giving them any food other than half-spoiled bread. The Indians spend the night under the open sky. Because the wage is only paid at the end of their term of forced labor, the Indians have no means to buy the necessary warm clothing for themselves. It is no surprise that under such circumstances, the work in the encomenderos is utterly exhausting for them and can be identified as one of the reasons for the Indians dying off so rapidly.^LXXIV

This system of forced wage labor was introduced at the beginning of the seventeenth century by the Spanish crown, making it officially and universally legal. The stated reason for the law was that the Indians would not work voluntarily and that without them the mines could only be run with great difficulty, despite the presence of the African slaves. The Indian villagers were thus required to provide the number of workers demanded (in Peru, a seventh of the population, in New Spain, 4 percent), and these were at the mercy of the encomenderos. The deadly consequences of this system were immediately apparent. An anonymous memorandum sent to Philip IV, under the title “Report on the Dangerous Situation of the Kingdom of Chile from the Temporal and Spiritual Point of View,” stated:

The known cause of the rapid decrease in the number of natives is the system of forced labor in the mines and on the fields of the encomenderos. Although the Spanish have an enormous number of Negroes at their disposal, although they have taxed the Indians at a higher rate than they paid their leaders before the conquest, they nevertheless regard it as impossible to give up this system of forced labor.^LXXV

In addition, forced labor resulted in the Indians in many cases being unable to cultivate their fields, which the Spanish then used as a pretext to seize the land for themselves as “waste land.” The ruin of Indian farming offered a fertile ground for extortion. “Among their native rulers,” according to Zurita, “the Indians did not know any usurers.”^LXXVI The Spanish taught them very well these blessings of money economy and taxation. Eaten up by debt, huge lands owned by the Indians—those that had not already been simply stolen by the Spanish—fell into the hands of Spanish capitalists, with the assessment of their value forming a special example of European perfidy. Between them, the theft of land, taxation, forced labor and usury formed a tight circle in which the existence of the Indian mark community collapsed. The traditional public order and customary social bonds of the Indians were dissolved by the collapse of their economic base—mark community farming. For their part, the Spanish methodically destroyed it by disrupting all traditional forms of authority. The village and tribal chiefs had to be confirmed by the encomenderos, who used this prerogative to fill these positions with their own protégés, the most depraved subjects of Indian society. Another favorite method of the Spanish was the systematic instigation of the Indians against their leaders. Under the auspices of their Christian aims, of protecting the natives from being exploited by their chiefs, they declared them free from paying the dues that these had received since time immemorial. “The Spanish,” writes Zurita, “based on what is happening in Mexico today, maintain that the chiefs are plundering their own tribes, but they bear the blame for this extortion, since they themselves and no one else robbed the former chiefs of their position and income and replaced them with ones from among their protégés.”^LXXVII Likewise, they looked to instigate mutinies whenever village or tribal chiefs protested against illicit lands sales to the Spanish by individual members of the mark. The result was chronic revolts, and an endless succession of legal proceedings over unlawful land sales among the natives themselves. Along with ruin, hunger, and slavery, anarchy added to the mix that made the existence of the Indians hell. The stark result of this Spanish-Christian guardianship can be summed up in two phrases: the land going into the hands of the Spanish, and the extinction of the Indians. “In all the Spanish areas of the Indies,” Zurita writes,

either the native tribes disappear completely or they become much smaller, although others have claimed the opposite. The natives leave their dwellings and farms, since these have lost all value for them in the face of the exorbitant dues in money and kind; they emigrate to other regions, continuously wandering from one region to another, or they hide themselves in the forest and run the danger of becoming, sooner or later, the prey of wild animals. Many Indians end their lives by suicide, as I personally witnessed several times and learned from interviews with the local population.^LXXVIII

And half a century later, another high official of the Spanish government in Peru, Juan Ortiz de Cervantes, reported:

The native population in the Spanish colonies grow ever more thin on the ground; they abandon the areas they formerly inhabited, leaving the soil uncultivated, and the Spanish have to struggle to find the necessary number of peasants and herdsmen. The so-called Mitayos,¹⁶⁴ a tribe without whom work in the gold and silver mines would be impossible, either completely abandon the cities occupied by the Spanish, or if they stay, die out at an astonishing rate.^LXXIX

We may truly wonder at the incredible tenacity of the Indian people and their mark community institutions, since remains of both persisted well into the nineteenth century, despite these conditions.

The great English colony of India shows us another aspect of the fate of the mark community. Here, as in no other corner of the earth, one can study the most varying forms of property that represent the history of several millennia, like [William] Herschel’s “star gages” model of the sky¹⁶⁵ projected onto a flat surface. Village communities alongside tribal communities; periodic repartitionings of equal portions of land alongside lifelong ownership of unequal portions of land; communal labor alongside private individual enterprise; equal rights of all villagers to community lands alongside the privileges of certain groups; and finally, beside all these forms of communal property, private property in land in the form of smaller subplots of rural land, short-term leaseholds, and enormous latifundia. All of this could still be observed in India, as large as life, a few decades ago. Indian legal sources attest that the mark community in India is an ancient system. The oldest common law, the Code of Manu¹⁶⁶ from the ninth century BC, contains countless ordinances concerning border disputes between mark communities, unpartitioned marks, and the new settlement of daughter villages on unpartitioned land of older marks. The code knows only ownership based on one’s own labor; it mentions handicrafts only as a side-occupation of agriculture; it attempts to rein in the power of the Brahmins, the priests, by only allowing them to be granted moveable property. The future indigenous sovereigns, the rajas, appear in these codes still as elected tribal high chiefs. The two later codes, Yajnavalkya¹⁶⁷ and Narada,¹⁶⁸ which are from the fifth century, recognize the clan as the social organization, with public and judicial authority lying in the hands of the assembly of mark members. These are, jointly and collectively, responsible for the misdeeds and crimes of individuals. Standing at the head of the village is the elected mark leader. Both legal codes advise electing the best, most peace-loving and most even-handed community member to this office and offering him unconditional obedience. The Code of Narada already distinguishes between two kinds of mark communities: “relatives” or clan-based communities, and “cohabitants” or neighboring communities as local associations of non-blood relatives. Yet, at the same time, both legal codes only recognize ownership based on individual labor. Abandoned land belongs to the person who takes it over for cultivation. Illegal occupation is still not recognized after three generations if the individuals in question do not cultivate the land. Up to this point, we therefore see the Indian people still enclosed within the same primitive social groups and economic relations, as they existed for centuries in the Indus region and subsequently in the heroic period of the Ganges conquest, from which the great folk epics of the Ramayana¹⁶⁹ and the Mahabharata¹⁷⁰ were born. It is only in the commentaries on the old legal codes, which are always the characteristic symptom of deep social changes and aspirations, that one sees old legal views reinterpreted in the light of new interests. This is clear proof that up to the fourteenth century—the epoch of the commentators—Indian society went through significant adjustments in its social structure. In the meantime, an influential priestly class had developed, rising above the mass of peasants both materially and legally. These commentators—just like their Christian colleagues in the feudal West—seek to “explain” the precise language of the old legal codes in such a way as to justify priestly ownership of property and encourage the donation of land to the Brahmins, and in this way promote the division of the mark lands and the formation of clerical landed property at the expense of the mass of peasant farmers. This development was typical of the fate of all Oriental societies.

The life-and-death question for every form of developed agriculture in most parts of the Orient is irrigation.^LXXX  171 We see at an early date in India, just as in Egypt, large-scale irrigation systems as a solid foundation for agriculture, along with canals, streams and systematic precautionary measures to protect the land from periodic flooding. From the outset, all of these large undertakings were beyond the capacity of the individual mark community, in terms of the forces, initiative and planning they required. Their direction and execution were the work of an authority that stood above the individual village marks, one that could bring labor-power together on a larger scale. Also required was a mastery of natural laws greater than that available to the observational and experiential world of the mass of peasants, enclosed in the limits of their villages. Out of these needs arose the important function of the priests in the Orient, who were able to direct large public works such as irrigation systems by virtue of their observation of nature, this being an integral part of every nature-based religion; the priests’ exemption from direct participation in agricultural labor, a freedom that was the product of a certain stage of development, allowed them to direct the irrigation work. Naturally, over time, this purely economic function grew into a particular type of social power held by the priests. The specialization of these members of society, which emerged from the division of labor, turned into a hereditary, exclusive caste with privileges over the peasant masses and an interest in their exploitation. The pace and extent of this process for a particular people, whether it remained embryonic as in the case of the Peruvian Indians, or developed into official state rule by the priestly caste, theocracy, as in Egypt or among the ancient Hebrews, was always dependent on the specific geographical and historical circumstances. But it also depended on whether frequent contact with surrounding peoples allowed a strong warrior caste to emerge outside of the priestly caste, and raise itself up as a military aristocracy in competition with or indeed above the priests. In either case, it was the case again here that the specific, particularistic narrowness of the ancient communistic mark, with an organization unsuited for larger economic or political tasks, forced it to cede these functions to forces that dominated it from outside. These functions so surely offered the key to the political domination and economic exploitation of the peasant masses, that all barbarian conquerors in the Orient, whether Mongols, Persians, or Arabs, were forced, alongside their military power, to take control of the management and execution of the large public undertakings required for the agricultural economy. Just as the Incas in Peru regarded the supervision of artificial irrigation projects and of road and bridge construction as not only a privilege but a duty, so the various Asiatic despotic dynasties that succeeded one another in India applied themselves just as diligently. Despite the formation of castes, despite despotic foreign rule over the country, and despite political upheavals, the tranquil village pursued its existence in the depths of Indian society. Within each village the ancient traditional statutes of the mark constitution prevailed, continuing beneath the storms of political history its own calm and unremarked internal history, shedding old forms and adopting new ones, experiencing prosperity and decline, dissolution and regeneration. No chronicler ever portrayed these events, and when world history describes the bold campaign of Alexander [the Great] of Macedon all the way to the sources of the Indus, and is full of the battle sounds of bloody Timur and ¹⁷² it remains completely silent about the internal economic history of the Indian people. It is only from survivals of the various ancient layers of this history that we can reconstruct Indian society’s hypothetical pattern of development, and it is the achievement of Kovalevsky to have unraveled this. According to Kovalevsky, the various types of agrarian communities that were still observed in the mid-nineteenth century in India can be placed in the following historical sequence:

1) The oldest form is that of the pure clan community, comprising the totality of blood relatives in a clan or kinship group, which owns the land in common and cultivates it communally. Here the communal land is therefore unpartitioned, and it is only the products of the harvest, as well as those in communal storage, that are distributed. This most primitive type of village community survived only in a few districts of northern India, its inhabitants largely confined to a few branches (putti) of the old gens. Kovalevsky sees in this, by analogy with the zadruga of Bosnia-Herzegovina,¹⁷³ the product of a dissolution of the original blood relationship, which as a result of the growth of the population, broke up into a number of large families that withdrew from the community with their lands. In the middle of the previous century there were still a considerable number of village communities of this type, some of them with more than 150 members, while others boasted 400. More predominant, however, was the small village community, which came together in larger kinship groups on the area of the old gens only in exceptional cases, i.e. in connection with the sale of land. As a general rule, they led the isolated and strictly regulated existence that Marx, using English sources, portrays in a few short passages in Capital:^LXXXI

These small and extremely ancient Indian communities, for example, some of which continue to exist to this day, are based on the possession of the land in common, on the blending of agriculture and handicrafts and on an unalterable division of labor, which serves as a fixed plan and basis for action whenever a new community is started. The communities occupy areas of from a hundred up to several thousand acres, and each forms a compact whole producing all it requires. Most of the products are destined for direct use by the community itself, and are not commodities. Hence production here is independent of that division of labor brought about in Indian society as a whole by the exchange of commodities. It is the surplus alone that becomes a commodity, and a part of that surplus cannot become a commodity until it has reached the hands of the state, because from time immemorial a certain quantity of the community’s production has found its way to the state as rent in kind. The form of the community varies in different parts of India. In the simplest communities, the land is tilled in common, and the produce is divided among the members. At the same time, spinning and weaving are carried on in each family as subsidiary industries. Alongside the mass of people thus occupied in the same way, we find the “chief inhabitant,” who is judge, police authority and tax-gatherer in one; the book-keeper, who keeps the accounts of the tillage and registers everything relating to this; another official, who prosecutes criminals, protects strangers traveling through and escorts them to the next village; the boundary man, who guards the boundaries against neighboring communities; the water-overseer, who distributes the water from the common tasks for irrigation; the Brahmin, who conducts the religious services; the schoolmaster, who on the sand teaches the children reading and writing; the calendar Brahmin, or astrologer, who makes known the lucky or unlucky days for seed-time and harvest, and for every other kind of agricultural work; a smith and a carpenter, who make and repair all the agricultural implements; the potter, who makes all the pottery of the village; the barber, the washerman, who washes clothes, the silversmith, here and there the poet, who in some communities replaces the silversmith, in others the schoolmaster. This dozen or so of individuals is maintained at the expense of the whole community. If the population increases, a new community is founded, on the pattern of the old one, on unoccupied land … The law that regulates the division of labor in the community acts with the irresistible authority of a law of nature … The simplicity of the productive organism in these self-sufficing communities which constantly reproduce themselves in the same form and, when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the same spot and with the same name—this simplicity supplies the key to the riddle of the unchangeability of Asiatic societies, which is in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic states, and their never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the fundamental economic elements of society remains untouched by the storms that blow up in the cloudy regions of politics.^LXXXII

2) At the time of the English conquest, the original tribal community had in most cases already been dissolved. From its dissolution, however, emerged a new form, a kinship community with partitioned agricultural land, though not equally divided. The unequal lots of land were given to individual families and their size was based on the family’s relationship to the tribal ancestors. This form was prevalent in northwestern India as well as in Punjab. The lots here were neither held for life nor were they hereditary; they remained in the family’s possession until such time as the growth of the population or the need to allocate a lot to a relative who had been temporarily absent made a repartitioning necessary. Frequently, however, new claims were satisfied not by a general repartitioning, but by allocating new parcels of uncultivated communal land. In this way, the familial lots of land were often—in fact, if not in law—theirs for life, and even inheritable. Alongside this unevenly partitioned communal land, forests, marshes, fields, and uncultivated land still belonged in common to all the families, who likewise utilized them collectively. This unusual communistic organization based on inequality came into contradiction with new interests. With each new generation, determining the degree of kinship became more difficult, the tradition of blood ties faded, and the inequality of the familial lots of land was increasingly felt as an injustice by those disadvantaged by it. In many regions, on the other hand, a mixing of the population unavoidably took place, whether because of the departure of some of the kinship group, because of war and extermination of another part of the population, or because of the settlement and acceptance of new arrivals. Thus, the population of the community, despite all the apparent immobility and immutability of their conditions, was indeed subdivided according to the quality of the soil into fields (wund), each family receiving a few strips of land both in the better, irrigated fields (which were called sholgura from shola, or rice) and in the inferior ones (culmee).¹⁷⁴ Reallocations were not originally periodic, at least before the English conquest, but took place each time population growth caused a real inequality in the economic situation of the families. This was especially true in communities rich in land, which had a supply of utilizable fields. In smaller communities, repartitioning occurred every ten, eight or five years, often every year. This was particularly the case where there was a lack of good fields, making equal distribution each year to all members of the mark impossible, so that only by rotating the use of the various fields could an equitable balance be achieved. Thus, the Indian tribal community ends, as it is disintegrating, by assuming the form that is historically established as the original German mark community.

With British India and Algeria,¹⁷⁵ we see two classic examples of the desperate struggle and the tragic end of the ancient communist economic organization through contact with European capitalism. The picture of the changeable fate of the mark community would not be complete if we failed to take into consideration the remarkable example of a country where history apparently took an entirely different course. In this case, the state did not seek to destroy the communal property of the peasants through force, but on the contrary, attempted to rescue and preserve it with all the means at its disposal. This country is tsarist Russia.

We do not need to concern ourselves here with the enormous theoretical debate on the origins of the Russian peasant commune that has gone on for decades. It was only natural, in complete accord with the general hostile attitude toward primitive communism among contemporary bourgeois scholarship, that the “discovery” by the Russian Professor [Boris] Chicherin in 1858, according to whom the agricultural commune in Russia was not an original historical product at all, but supposedly an artificial product of the fiscal policy of tsarism, should have achieved such a favorable reception and acceptance among German scholars.^LXXXIII Chicherin, who yet again provides proof that liberal scholars are, as historians, for the most part much more ineffectual than their reactionary colleagues, still accepts the theory, which has already been definitively abandoned for Western Europe since Maurer, that the Russians settled in individual settlements from which communes developed, supposedly only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹⁷⁶ In this connection, Chicherin derives collective farming and the imposition of plots of land from the crop rotation of strips of the common land, collective ownership of the land likewise from boundary disputes, and the public power of the mark community from the collective burden of the poll tax introduced in the sixteenth century. Thus, in a typically liberal fashion, he more or less turns all historical contexts, causes and consequences upside down.

Whatever one thinks about the antiquity of the peasant agricultural commune and its origins, it has, in any case, outlived the whole long history of serfdom as well as its dissolution, through to most recent times. We shall deal here only with its fate in the nineteenth century.

When Tsar Alexander II enacted his so-called “emancipation” of the peasants, their own land was sold to them by the lords—following completely the Prussian example—with the latter being well indemnified by the treasury in bonds for the worst areas of the land they allegedly owned, imposing a debt of 900 million rubles,¹⁷⁷ to be repaid at an annual rate of 6 percent within forty-nine years. This land was not, as in Prussia, assigned to individual peasant families as private property, but to whole communities as inalienable and unmortgageable communal property. The entire community took joint responsibility for the debt repayment, just as they had for the various taxes and dues, and had a free hand in assessing the shares of its individual members. This was the arrangement made for the entire massive area of the Great Russian peasantry. In the early 1890s, the distribution of landownership in European Russia (leaving out Poland, Finland, and the region of the Don Cossacks¹⁷⁸) was as follows: public domains, consisting mostly of enormous forest regions in the north and of wastelands, encompassed 150 million dessiatines;^LXXXIV imperial appanages,¹⁷⁹ 7 million; church and municipal property, somewhat less than 9 million; in private ownership, 93 million (only 5 percent of this belonging to the peasants, the rest to the aristocracy), while 131 million dessiatines were communal peasant property. As late as 1900, there were 122 million hectares of communal peasant property, against only 22 million that were the property of individual peasants.¹⁸⁰

Looking at the economy of the Russian peasantry in this enormous area, as it existed until recently and in part still exists today, it is again easy to recognize the typical structures of the mark community, as these existed in Germany and Africa, on the Ganges and in Peru. The mark’s fields were partitioned, while forests, grasslands and bodies of water were undivided communal land. With the general prevalence of the primitive three-field crop rotation, summer and winter fields were divided according to soil quality into strips (“charts”), and each strip into smaller segments. The summer strips were distributed in April and the winter ones in June. With scrupulous observation of equal land distribution, the diversity of crops had become so developed that in the Moscow province, for example, there were in both the summer and winter fields an average of eleven strips each, so that each peasant had at least twenty-two scattered parcels of land to cultivate. The community usually reserved plots of land for emergency communal purposes, or laid up stocks for the same purpose, to which each individual member had to supply grain. The technical progress of the economy was ensured by each peasant family being able to keep their land for ten years on condition that they fertilized it, or each field being divided from the start into parcels of land that were fertilized from the outset and only repartitioned every ten years. Most of the flax fields and the fruit and vegetable gardens were subject to the same rule.

The allocation of various meadows and pastures for the community herds, the marking of herds, the fencing of meadows and the protection of fields, as well as decisions over system of rotation, the time for particular field work, and the date and method of repartitioning—all of this was a matter for the community, or more specifically, the village assembly. As far as the frequency of repartitioning was concerned, there was great diversity. In one particular province, for example, Saratov,¹⁸¹ nearly half of the 278 village communities studied in 1877 undertook a reallotment each year, while the remainder did this every two, three, five, six, eight or eleven years. At the same time, thirty-eight communities that practiced collective fertilization had given up repartitioning altogether.^LXXXV

What is most remarkable about the Russian mark community is the method of land apportionment. The principle of equal lots common among the Germans was not prevalent in the Russian case, nor was a determination based on the needs of the particular family, as in Peru. Instead, the principle of taxability was the single determining factor. The government’s concern with taxation continued to dominate the life of the commune after the peasants’ “emancipation,” and all the village institutions revolved around taxation. For the tsarist government, taxation was based on the so-called “audited souls,” that is, all the male inhabitants of the community without distinction of age, as determined every twenty years, since the first peasant census under Peter the Great, by the famous “audits” that were the terror of the Russian people and tore whole communities apart.^LXXXVI

The government taxed the villages on the basis of the number of audited “souls.” Yet the commune allocated the total amount of tax for which it was liable on peasant households according to their number of workers, and it was the tax capacity measured in this way that determined each household’s portion of land. Rather than a basis of sustenance for the peasants, land allocation in Russia after 1861 was a basis of taxation. It was not a benefit to which each household was entitled, but an obligation imposed on every member of the commune as a state service. There was nothing more strange than the Russian village assembly for the partitioning of land. From all sides could be heard protests against the allocation of too large parcels of land—poor families with no real workers, made up predominantly of women or children, were generally spared from being allocated a parcel of land, on grounds of “powerlessness,” while larger allotments were forced on wealthy peasants by the mass of poorer peasants. The tax burden that is so central to Russian village life is also enormous. On top of the debt repayments, there were also poll taxes, a village tax, church tax, salt tax, etc. In the 1880s, the poll tax and salt tax were abolished, yet the tax burden remained so enormous that it devoured all of the peasantry’s economic resources. According to a statistic from the 1890s, 70 percent of the peasantry drew less than a minimum existence from their land allotments, 20 percent were able to feed themselves, but not to keep livestock, while only 9 percent had a surplus above their own needs that could be taken to market. Tax arrears were therefore a frequent phenomenon of the Russian village from the “emancipation” onwards. Already in the 1870s, an average yearly intake of fifty million rubles from the poll tax was accompanied by an annual deficit of eleven million rubles. After the poll tax was lifted, the poverty of the Russian village continued to grow, due to the simultaneous escalation of indirect taxation from the eighties onward. In 1904, the tax arrears amounted to 127 million rubles, a debt that was almost completely cancelled because collecting it had become totally impossible and because of the general revolutionary ferment. The taxes not only ate up all of the peasants’ income, they also forced them to seek side occupations. One of these was seasonal farm labor, which brought whole migrations of peoples into the Russian hinterland, the strongest male villagers moving to the large aristocratic estates to be hired as day laborers, while their own fields back home were left in the weaker hands of older, female, and adolescent workers. The beckoning of the city with its manufacturing industries offered another possibility. In the central industrial region, therefore, a class of temporary workers formed who moved to the city only for the winter, mostly to textile factories, returning to their villages with their earnings in the spring to work in the fields. Finally, in many districts, there was industrial domestic work or occasional agricultural work on the side, such as transport or chopping wood. And even with all of this, the large majority of the peasant masses could hardly support themselves. Not only was the whole agricultural yield swallowed by taxation, but their extra earnings as well. The mark community, which was collectively liable for the taxes, was equipped with strong means of enforcement vis-à-vis its members. It could hire out those in arrears with their taxes for wage labor, and requisition their earned income. It issued or refused internal passports to its members, without which a peasant was unable to leave the village. Finally, it had the legal right to inflict corporal punishment on those whose taxes were intractably in arrears. Periodically, this made the Russian village in the enormous stretches of the Russian interior a horrific sight. Upon the arrival of the tax collectors, a procedure began for which tsarist Russia coined the term “flogging out those in arrears.” The entire village assembly appeared, the “evaders” had to take off their trousers and lay down on a bench, whereupon they were brutally beaten with a birch by their fellow mark members, one after the other. The moaning and weeping of those being thrashed—most often bearded family fathers, even white-haired old men—accompanied the higher authorities, who, after they had completed their task with the ringing of bells, went off in their troikas to hunt in another community and carry out the same punishments. It was not uncommon for a peasant to spare himself this public punishment by committing suicide. Another unique product of those circumstances was the “tax beggar,” an impoverished old peasant who took to begging as a tramp in order to cobble together the taxes due and bring them back to the village. The state watched over the mark community, which had been turned into a tax machine, with severity and persistence. A law of 1881, for example, decreed that the community could only sell agricultural land if two-thirds of the peasants made that decision, after which it was still necessary to get the consent of the ministry of the interior, the ministry of finance, and the ministry of crown lands. Individual peasants were allowed to sell their inherited lands only to other members of the mark community. Taking on a mortgage was forbidden. Under Alexander III, the village community was robbed of all autonomy and placed under the thumb of “land captains,” an institution similar to the Prussian district administrators.¹⁸² Decisions made by the village assembly required the consent of these officials; repartitionings of land were undertaken under their supervision, as were tax assessment and debt collection. The law of 1893 made a partial concession to time pressure by declaring repartitionings permissible only every twelve years. Yet, at the same time, withdrawing from the mark community required the consent of the community and was allowed only on condition that the person involved contributed his individual portion of the repayment debt in full.

Despite all of these artificial legal binds that squeezed the village community, despite the guardianship of three ministries and a swarm of chinovniks [petty officials], the dissolution of the mark community could no longer be prevented. There was the crushing tax burden; the deterioration of the peasant economy as a result of the side activities in agricultural and industrial work; a shortage of land, especially pasture and forest, which had already been grabbed by the aristocracy at the time of emancipation, and a shortage of arable fields due to increasing population. All of this had two critical effects: the flight to the city and the rise of usury within the village. To the extent that the combination of peasant farming and outside work in industry or elsewhere increasingly served only to pay the tax burden, without ever providing a real subsistence, membership in the mark community became like an iron chain of hunger around the necks of the peasants. The natural desire of the poorer members of the community was to escape from this chain. Hundreds of fugitives were returned by the police to their communities as undocumented vagabonds, then made an example of by being beaten on a bench with rods by their mark comrades. But even the rods and the enforcement of passport controls proved powerless against the mass flight of the peasants, who fled from the hell of their “village communism” to the city under cover of darkness, to plunge definitively into the sea of the industrial proletariat. Others, for whom family bonds or other circumstances made escape inadvisable, sought to accomplish their exit from the agricultural commune by legal means. To achieve this, they had to contribute their share of the debt repayment, and were assisted here by moneylenders. Early on, not only the tax burden but the forced sale of grain on the most unacceptable terms in order to repay these debts exposed the Russian peasant to usurers. Every emergency, every bad crop made resort to them unavoidable. And ultimately, even emancipation from the yoke of the community was unattainable for most unless they put themselves under the new yoke of the usurer, paying dues and other services for an incalculable length of time. While the impoverished peasants sought to flee the mark community in order to free themselves from misery, many wealthy peasants simply turned their backs on it and left the commune in order to escape responsibility for the taxes of the poor. But even where there was less official departure of wealthy peasants, these individuals, who were in large part also the village usurers, formed a ruling power over the peasant masses, and knew how to extract decisions convenient to themselves from the indebted, dependent majority. Thus, in the womb of a village community officially based on equality and communal property, there grew a clear division of classes into a small but influential village bourgeoisie and a mass of dependent and effectively proletarianized peasants. The internal breakup of the village commune—crushed by taxes, eaten by usurers, and internally divided—eventually made waves outside as well: famine and peasant revolts were frequent occurrences in Russia in the 1880s, being put down by the provincial administrations with the same implacability as the tax executors and the military showed when coming to “pacify” the village. In many regions, Russian fields became the scene of horrific death by starvation and bloody turmoil. The Russian muzhik [peasant] experienced the fate of the Indian peasant, and Orissa¹⁸³ here is Saratov, Samara, and so on down the Volga.^LXXXVII When the revolution of the urban proletariat finally broke out in Russia in 1904 and 1905, the peasant insurrections, which had been chaotic up to that point, became a political factor by their sheer weight, tipping the scales of revolution and making the agricultural question a central issue. Now, as the peasants poured over the aristocratic estates like an irresistible flood, setting the “aristocrats’ nests” on fire with their cry for land, while the workers’ party formulated the distress of the peasantry into a revolutionary demand to expropriate state property and the landed estates without compensation and to place them into the hands of the peasants, tsarism finally retreated from the centuries-old agrarian policies that it had pursued with such iron persistence. The mark community could no longer be resuscitated; it had to be abandoned. Already in 1902, the axe was taken to the very roots of the village community in its specific Russian incarnation, with the abolition of collective liability for taxes. Of course, this measure was actively prepared by the financial policies of tsarism itself. The treasury could easily forgo collective liability when it came to direct taxation, now that indirect taxation had reached such a level that in the budget of 1906, for example, out of a total revenue of 2,030 million rubles, only 148 million came from direct taxes and 1,100 million from indirect taxes, including 558 million from the spirits monopoly alone, a tax that was implemented by the “liberal” minister, Count Witte, to combat drunkenness. The poverty, hopelessness, and ignorance of the peasants offered the most reliable form of collective liability for punctual payment of this tax. In 1905 and 1906, the remaining debt in repayment for emancipation was halved, and it was cancelled altogether in 1907. The “agrarian reform” implemented in 1907 then had the avowed aim of creating private peasant property.¹⁸⁴ The means for this were to come from the parceling of domains, appanages, and, in part, landed estates. Thus, the proletarian revolution of the twentieth century, even in its first, incomplete phase, had already destroyed, at the same time, the last remainders of bondage and the mark community, which had been artificially preserved by tsarism.¹⁸⁵

3

With the Russian village commune, the varied fate of primitive agrarian communism comes to an end; the circle is closed. Beginning as a natural product of social development, as the best guarantee of economic progress, and of the material and intellectual flourishing of society, the mark community ends here as an abused tool of political and economic backwardness. The Russian peasant, who is beaten with rods by his fellow community members in the service of tsarist absolutism, offers the most horrific historical critique of the limits of primitive communism and the most evident expression of the fact that even this social form is subject to the dialectical law that reason becomes unreason, a benefit becomes a scourge.¹⁸⁶

Two facts spring to mind on close contemplation of the fate of the mark community in various countries and continents. Far from being a rigid, unchangeable pattern, this highest and final form of the primitive communist economic system displays above all endless diversity, flexibility and adaptability, as seen in its various forms. In each context, and under all circumstances, it undergoes a silent process of transformation, which, because of its slow pace, may be hardly apparent at first from the outside. Inside the society, however, new forms are always replacing old ones and it accordingly survives under any political superstructure of native or foreign institutions, its economic and social life constantly developing and decaying, advancing and declining.

At the same time, this social form shows an extraordinary tenacity and stability precisely because of its elasticity and adaptability. It defies all the storms of political history; or rather it tolerates them passively, lets them pass and patiently endures for centuries the strains of every form of conquest, foreign rule, despotism and exploitation. There is only one contact that it cannot tolerate or overcome—contact with European civilization, i.e. with capitalism. This encounter is deadly for the old society, universally and without exception, and it accomplishes what millennia and the most savage Oriental conquerors could not: the dissolution of the whole social structure from the inside, tearing apart all traditional bonds and transforming the society in a short period of time into a shapeless pile of rubble.

But this deadly breeze from European capitalism is simply the last and not the sole factor that brings about the inevitable decline of primitive society. The seeds of this lie within the society itself. If we take the various paths of its decline together, those that we know from a number of examples, this establishes a certain historical order of succession. Communist ownership of the means of production, as the basis of a rigorously organized economy, offered the most productive social labor process and the best material assurance of its continuity and development for many epochs. But even the progress in labor productivity that it secured, albeit slowly, necessarily came into conflict with the communistic organization over time. After the decisive progress to a higher form of agriculture, with the use of the ploughshare, had been accomplished and the mark community had retained its solid form on this basis, the next step in the development of the technology of production after a certain amount of time necessitated a more intensive land cultivation, which could only be achieved at that stage of agricultural technology by more intensive smallholding and by a stronger and closer relationship of the individual laborer to the soil. Longer use of the same parcel of land by a single peasant family became the precondition for its more careful treatment. In both Germany and Russia, fertilization of the soil led to the gradual abandonment of land repartitioning. In general, we can identify a trait that is constant everywhere in the life of the mark community: the movement toward increasingly long intervals between land reallotments, universally leading sooner or later to a transition from allotted land to inherited land. In the same way that the transformation of communal property into private property keeps pace with the intensification of labor, it is noticeable that forest and pasture remained communal the longest, while intensively worked farmland led first to the partitioned mark and then to hereditary property. Establishing private property in parcels of arable land does not completely abolish the entire communal economic organization, which continues to be upheld by crop rotation and enforced in forest and pastoral communities. The economic and social equality at the heart of ancient society are still not destroyed by it either. Initially forms what comes into being is a mass of small peasants, equal in their living conditions, who can generally continue to work and live for centuries according to their old traditions. Yet the inheritability of property certainly opens the gates to future inequality, by the heritability of holdings and the primogeniture or other settlements that follow from this, subsequently by their salability or general alienability.

The undermining of the traditional social organization by the processes referred to above proceeds extremely slowly. There are other historical factors at work that accomplish this more quickly and thoroughly, in particular large-scale public works projects, which the mark community with its narrow limits is unable to tackle by its very nature. We have already seen the critical importance that artificial irrigation has for agriculture in the Orient. The great intensification of labor and powerful rise in productivity here led to quite different far-reaching results than the changeover to fertilization in the West. From the outset, artificial irrigation work is a mass work and a large-scale undertaking. Precisely because of this, there is no suitable institution for it within the organization of the mark community, so that special institutions standing above this had to be created. We know that the direction of public waterworks lay at the root of the domination by the priests and every Oriental power. But also in the West, and more generally, there are various public matters that, though simple in comparison to contemporary state organization, had nevertheless to be seen to in every primitive society. These grew with the development and progress of the society, therefore eventually requiring special organs. On all sides—from Germany to Peru, from India to Algeria—we can define the path of development as the tendency in primitive societies to transform elected public offices to inherited ones.

Initially, however, this turnaround, proceeding slowly and imperceptibly, is still not a break with the foundations of communistic society. Rather, the inheritability of these public offices is a natural result of the fact that here too, by the very nature of primitive societies, collective experience, tradition and personal, ensures the successful handling of such offices. Over time, however, the inheritability of the offices leads unavoidably to the creation of a small local aristocracy, former servants of the community becoming its rulers. The undivided mark lands, the ager publicus of the Romans,¹⁸⁷ to which power adhered, served as the economic basis for advancing the status of this aristocracy. Theft of the undemarcated or unused lands of the mark is the common method of all indigenous and foreign rulers, who vault above the peasant masses and subjugate them politically. If the people in question are isolated from the major centers of civilization, the aristocracy may not distinguish itself very greatly in its lifestyle from that of the masses, and may still directly take part in the production process, while a certain democratic simplicity of customs covers up differences in wealth. This is the case with the tribal aristocracy of the Yakut people, which is merely endowed with more livestock than the ordinary people, and more influence in public affairs. Following an encounter with more civilized peoples, however, and vigorous trade, refined taste and relief from labor are soon added to the privileges of the aristocracy, and a true class differentiation takes place in society. The most typical example is Greece in the post-Homeric period.

Thus the division of labor at the heart of primitive society unavoidably leads, sooner or later, to the breakup of political and economic equality from inside. One public undertaking, however, plays an important role in this process and accomplishes the work more aggressively than do public offices of a peaceful nature. This is warfare. It is originally a mass affair of the society in question, subsequently turned, in the wake of advances in production, into the speciality of certain circles within primitive society in question. The more advanced, continuous and systematic the labor process of the society, the less it tolerates the irregularities and the drain of time and energy resulting from war. If occasional military campaigns are a direct result of the economic system of hunting and nomadic herding, agriculture goes together with a great peacefulness and passivity among the mass of society, so that a special caste of warriors is often needed for protection. In one way or another, the existence of war, itself just an expression of the limits of labor productivity, plays an important role for all primitive peoples and universally leads over time to a new form of division of labor. The separation of a military aristocracy or military leadership is the hardest blow that the social equality of the primitive society must endure. This is why, wherever we learn of primitive societies, either as survivals from past history or still existing today, we almost never come across any longer such free and equal relations as Morgan was able to convey to us with the serendipitous example of the Iroquois. On the contrary, inequality and exploitation are everywhere characteristics of the primitive societies we encounter, being the product of a long history of disintegration, whether it is a matter of the ruling castes of the Orient, the tribal aristocracy of the Yakuts, the “great clansmen” of the Scottish Celts, the military aristocracy of the Greeks, Romans and migrating Germans, or lastly, to the petty despots of the African empires.

If we look, for example, at the famous empire of Mwata Kazembe in south-central Africa, to the east of the Lunda empire,¹⁸⁸ into which the Portuguese penetrated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, we can see, right in the heart of Africa, in a region hardly touched by Europeans, primitive Negro social relations in which there is no longer much equality or freedom to be found. The 1831 expedition of Major [José] Monteiro and Captain [António] Gamitto, undertaken from the Zambezi into the interior for scientific and trading purposes, depicts this as follows. Initially, the expedition came into the land of the Marawi,¹⁸⁹ primitive hoe farmers living in small, conical palisade houses and wearing only a loincloth on their bodies. At the time that Monteiro and Gamitto traveled through Malawiland, it was under the rule of a despotic leader who went by the title nede. He adjudicated all disputes in his capital city, Muzenda, and no disputing his decision was allowed. True to form, he convened a council of elders who were required, however, to agree with his opinion. The land was divided into provinces, which were governed by mambos, and these were then further divided into districts that were led by funos. All of these titles were hereditary.

On the eighth of August we reached the residence of Mukanda, the powerful leader of the Chewa.¹⁹⁰ Mukanda, who had been sent a gift of various cotton goods, red cloth, a number of pearls, salt and cowries,¹⁹¹ came on the following day, riding into the encampment on a black man. Mukanda was a man sixty or seventy years old, with a pleasant, majestic appearance. His only garment consisted of a dirty cloth that he had wrapped around his hips. He stayed for about two hours and, when he was leaving, asked everyone in a friendly and irresistible manner for a gift … The burial of the Chewa leaders is accompanied by extremely barbaric ceremonies. All of the wives of the departed are locked up with the corpse in the same hut until everything is ready for the burial. Then the funeral cortege moves … toward the crypt, and once it arrives, the favorite wife of the deceased, along with some others, climb into the crypt and sit down with their legs outstretched. This living foundation is then covered with draping and the cadaver laid on top of them, along with six other women who are thrown into the crypt after having their necks broken. Once the grave is covered, the terrifying ceremony ends with the impaling of two male youths, who are arranged on top of the grave, one at the head with a drum, the other at the feet with a bow and arrow. Major Monteiro, during his stay in Chewaland, was a witness to one such burial.

From here they went uphill into the middle of the empire. The Portuguese came to

a barren region, situated high up and almost entirely lacking in foodstuffs. Everywhere can be seen the signs of destruction by previous military campaigns, and famine plagued the expedition to a disturbing degree. Messengers were sent with a few gifts to the next mambo, in expectation of guides, but the messengers returned with the dispiriting news that they had encountered the mambo and his family close to starvation and death, completely alone in the village … Even before reaching the heart of the empire, samples of the barbarian justice that was part of everyday life there could be seen. It was common to encounter young people whose noses, hands, ears and other appendages had been cut off as punishment for some minor offence. On the nineteenth of November we entered the capital city, where the donkey that Captain Gamitto was riding caused a stir. Soon we arrived at a road about forty-five minutes long that was fenced in on both sides by two or three meter-high fences made of interwoven poles so elaborately constructed that they looked like walls. In these straw walls there were small open doors spaced apart from each other. At the end of the road, there was a small square hut open only to the west, in the middle of which stood a human figure crudely carved out of wood, seventy centimeters tall, on a wooden pedestal. In front of the open side lay a heap of more than 300 skulls. Here, the road turned into a large square area, at the end of which was a large forest only separated from the square by a fence. On the outside of it, on both sides of the gate, was a line tied on either side of the gate with thirty skulls strung onto it by way of ornamentation … Following this was the reception at Mwata’s with all barbarian pageantry and surrounded by his army of between five and six thousand men. He sat on a chair covered by a green cloth spread over a pile of leopard and lion skins. His head covering consisted of a scarlet conical cap, which was composed of half-meter long feathers. Wrapped around his forehead was a diadem made of glimmering stone; his neck and shoulders were covered by a kind of necklace made of shells, square pieces of mirror, and faux gems. Each of his arms was wrapped in a piece of blue cloth, decorated with fur, and his forearms also had ornamental strings made of blue stones. A yellow-, red- and blue-fringed cloth held together by a belt covered his lower body. His legs, like his arms, were decorated with blue jewels.

Mwata proudly sat there with seven parasols protecting him from the sun and swung around the tail of a wildebeest for a scepter, while twelve Negroes armed with brooms were busy removing every piece of dust from the ground, every impurity from his holy vicinity. A rather complicated court surrounded the ruler. First, guarding his throne were two rows of figures, forty centimeters high, in the shape of the upper body of a Negro adorned with animal horns, while between these figures sat two Negroes who burned aromatic leaves in coal pans. The place of honor was occupied by the two main wives, the first dressed more or less like Mwata. In the background, the harem of 400 women was assembled, and indeed these women were completely naked, apart from the aprons on their lower bodies. In addition, there were two hundred black women who stood waiting for the slightest command. Inside the quadrangle built by women sat the highest dignitaries of the kingdom, the kilolo, sitting on lion and leopard skins, each with an umbrella and dressed similarly to Mwata. There were also several corps of musicians, who made a deafening noise with their strangely shaped instruments, while a few court jesters, dressed in animal pelts and horns, ran around completing the entourage of Kazembe who, armed in this dignified manner, awaited the Portuguese advance. Mwata is the absolute ruler of this people, his title meaning simply “lord.” Underneath him are the kilolo, or the aristocrats, who are in turn divided into two classes. Among the more noble aristocrats are the crown prince, Mwata’s closest relatives, and the high commanders of his army. But the very lives and property of these nobles exist only due to Mwata’s absolute power.

If this tyrant is in a bad mood, he will have a person’s ears cut off if he does not understand a command and asks for it to be repeated, “in order to teach him to listen more carefully.” Every theft in his kingdom is punished by the amputation of the ears and hands; anyone who approaches one of his women or attempts to talk to her is killed or has all his limbs hobbled. The reputation he has among this superstitious people is that one cannot touch him without falling prey to his magical powers. Since it is impossible to avoid all contact with him, the people have discovered a means to avoid death. Anyone who has dealings with him kneels down before him, and the lord lays the palm of his hand in a mysterious manner on the kneeler and thereby absolves him from the death curse.^LXXXVIII

This is a picture of a society that has moved a long way away from the original foundations of every primitive community, from equality and democracy. It should not, however, be a foregone conclusion that under this kind of political despotism, the relations of the mark community, the communal ownership of the land or communally organized labor cease to exist. The Portuguese intruders, who recorded precisely the superficial rubbish about costume and courtesans, have, like all Europeans, no eyes, no interest and no frame of reference when it comes to things that run counter to the European system of private ownership. In any case, the social inequality and despotism of primitive societies are completely distinct from the inequality that is common in civilized societies and transplanted now onto the primitive. The increase in status of the primitive aristocracy and the despotic power of the primitive leader are all natural products of this society, like all of its other conditions of life. They are only another expression of the helplessness of the society with respect to its natural surroundings and to its own social relations, a helplessness that appears both in magical cult practices and in the periodic famines that either partly or completely starve the despotic leader along with the mass of his subjects. This rule by an aristocracy and a chief is therefore in complete harmony with the other material and intellectual aspects of the society, as is clear from the significant fact that the political power of the primitive ruler is always closely bound up with the primitive nature religion, with the cult of the dead, and is sustained by it.

From this standpoint, Mwata Kazembe is the Lunda, whom fourteen wives follow alive into the grave and who rules over the life and death of his subjects according to his erratic moods, because he believes himself to be a magician, this being his people’s rock-solid conviction. The despotic “Prince Kasongo” on the Lomami river who, forty years later, with great dignity among his noblemen and his people, performed, by way of greeting the Englishman [Verney Lovett] Cameron, a hopping dance with his two naked daughters in a woman’s skirt braided with monkey skins and with a filthy handkerchief on his head, is in fact a much less absurd and insanely comical phenomenon than the ruler “by the grace of God” over sixty-seven million members of a people who produced the likes of [Immanuel] Kant, [Hermann von] Helmholtz and [Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe. And yet even the worst enemy of this ruler could not call him a magician.

Primitive communist society, through its own internal development, leads to the formation of inequality and despotism. It has not yet disappeared; on the contrary, it can persist for many thousands of years under these primitive conditions. Such societies, however, sooner or later succumb to foreign occupation and then undergo a more or less far-reaching social reorganization. Foreign rule by Muslims is of special historical significance, since it predated European rule in vast stretches of Asia and Africa. Everywhere that nomadic Islamic peoples—whether Mongol or Arab— instituted and secured their foreign rule, a social process began that Henry Maine and Maksim Kovalevsky called the feudalization of the land. They did not make the land their own property, but instead turned their attention to two objectives, the collection of taxes and the military consolidation of their domination over the country. Both goals were served by a specific administrative-military organization, under which the land was divided into several ethnic groups and given as fiefdoms of a kind to Muslim officials, who were also tax collectors and military administrators. Large portions of uncultivated mark lands were utilized for the founding of military colonies. These institutions, together with the spread of Islam, implemented a profound change in the general conditions of existence of primitive societies. Only their economic conditions were little changed. The foundations and the organization of production remained the same and persisted for many centuries, despite exploitation and military pressure. Of course, Muslim rule was not always so considerate of the living conditions of the natives. For example, the Arabs on the east coast of Africa operated for centuries from the Zanzibar sultanate¹⁹² an extensive slave trade in Negroes, which led to frequent slave raids into the interior of Africa, the depopulation and destruction of whole African villages, and an escalation of despotic violence by the native chiefs, who found an enticing business venture in selling their own subjects or the subjugated members of neighboring tribes. Yet this transformation in conditions, which had such a profound effect on the fate of African society, was only accomplished as a further consequences of European influence: the slave trade in Negroes developed only after the discoveries and conquests of the Europeans in the sixteenth century, in order to service the plantations and mines exploited by the Europeans that were in full bloom in America and Asia.

The intrusion of European civilization was a disaster in every sense for primitive social relations. The European conquerors are the first who are not merely after subjugation and economic exploitation, but seize the very means of production, by ripping the land from under the feet of the native population. In this way, European capitalism deprives the primitive social order of its foundation. What emerges is something that is worse than all oppression and exploitation, total anarchy and that specifically European phenomenon of the uncertainty of social existence. The subjugated peoples, separated from their means of production, are regarded by European capitalism as mere laborers; if they are useful for this end, they are made into slaves, and if they are not, they are exterminated. We have witnessed this method in the Spanish, English, and French colonies. Before the advance of capitalism, the primitive social order, which outlasted all previous historical phases, capitulates. Its last remnants are eradicated from the earth and its elements—labor-power and means of production—are absorbed by capitalism. Early communist society fell everywhere, in the last instance, because it was made obsolete by economic progress, making room for new prospects of development. This development and progress are represented for a long time by the base methods of a class society, until this too is made obsolete and pushed aside by further progress. Here too, violence is merely the servant of economic development.

III. [COMMODITY PRODUCTION]

The task we have set ourselves is as follows. A society cannot exist without common labor, i.e. without labor with a plan and organization. And we have found various different forms of this, in all eras. In present-day society we hardly find it at all: neither rule nor law, nor democracy, no trace of plan and organization—anarchy. How is capitalist society possible?¹⁹³